On October 20, Perplexity Computer gained a fully local mode: the model and the agent both run on an Apple silicon Mac, for Pro, Max and Enterprise subscribers, with 36GB or more memory recommended. Files and reasoning stay on the Mac, but live information, the browser and sending mail still go online.
Apple is giving App Store Small Business Program developers free access to AFM 3 models on Private Cloud Compute if their apps have fewer than two million first-time downloads. The five-model family includes the sparse 20B-parameter AFM 3 Core Advanced, which activates only 1–4B parameters on-device, and AFM 3 Cloud Pro on Google Cloud NVIDIA GPUs, refined with outputs from Gemini.
Apple Foundation Models (AFM) is Apple's closed-ecosystem AI family. It evolved from a 3B dense model with LoRA adapters in 2024 into five models in 2026. AFM 3 Core Advanced runs a 20B IFP sparse architecture on phones while activating only 1–4B parameters; Cloud Pro runs on Google Cloud NVIDIA GPUs and is refined through Gemini distillation. There is no public API price or third-party benchmark, and access is limited to Apple's Foundation Models framework.
llama.cpp is the most widely used local LLM inference engine, implemented in pure C/C++. It supports CPU, Metal, CUDA, Vulkan, and other backends, and uses the GGUF quantization format to run multi-billion-parameter models on consumer hardware.
TurboQuant+ is an open-source implementation of a Google Research ICLR 2026 paper that uses PolarQuant + QJL two-stage quantization to compress the KV cache by 3.8-6.4x, enabling consumer hardware to run larger models with longer contexts.