Amar Subramanya

Apple Foundation Models 3 (AFM 3) bring on-device AI to iPhones and Macs via Google Gemini distillation

Apple announced its third-generation Foundation Models (AFM 3), a family of models distilled from Google Gemini and designed to run on-device on Apple silicon, including iPhones and Macs. The flagship on-device model, AFM 3 Core Advanced, uses a novel 'Instruction-Following Pruning' technique as an alternative to standard mixture-of-experts routing, enabling faster inference and flash-memory storage with 20B total parameters but only 1-4B active. The family also includes cloud-hosted variants (AFM 3 Cloud, Cloud Image, Cloud Pro), and Apple's Foundation Models Framework will allow developers to swap in third-party models like Claude or Gemini. No public benchmark results have been released yet; Apple says they will follow later in 2026.