Apple launches third-gen Foundation Models to fuse on-device intelligence with private cloud

Apple unveils the third generation of its Foundation Models (AFM 3), spanning on-device (AFM 3 Core and AFM 3 Core Advanced) and server-based options (AFM 3 Cloud, ADM 3 Cloud, AFM 3 Cloud Pro), all designed with privacy at the core and deeply integrated into Apple operating systems. A key advance is AFM 3 Core Advanced’s sparsely activated architecture (IFP), which runs most weights from flash and loads small expert subsets into DRAM to deliver multimodal capabilities on Apple silicon. Server models leverage Private Cloud Compute (with NVIDIA GPUs for Cloud Pro) to boost speed, reasoning, and image generation. Apple emphasizes responsible AI, extensive evaluations showing strong gains over prior generations, and states that user data is not used for training. A technical report with more details is planned for later this summer.