| a 60-90B model can outperform current SOTA

My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

That does seem to be the path Apple is following here. Have a local model that can answer most things and then have a fallback of cloud options when they request is too complex. The cleverness of this strategy has been overshadowed by the incredibly poor quality of their local models. It will be extremely interesting to see what next month holds and whether Google helped fine tune an Apple specific Gemini / Gemma model for their devices. Bonus points, of course, if they unveil the M5 Ultra Studio with half a terabyte of RAM to be a local "cloud model" (the true fantasy here of course would be Apple building something a little like openclaw where from your phone you could give commands to your Home Apple server). They could probably get away with charging $20k for it if it has sufficient tok/sec. If that happens and is successful one could imagine a straight line path in the next two generations to bringing the cost and form factor down to the point where some of the form factor of an Apple TV becomes everybody's home inference server / agentic HQ. Sovereign AI for everyone!

I think Apple might come out ahead by pure accident. Yes, Apple often waits to enter a market until it's established but in the case of AI they tried, they tried and failed. It was never the original plan to partner with OpenAI and then later with Google (Gemini). They 100% missed the boat on AI, the question now becomes: was the boat worth taking and we are still waiting to see how that plays out.

You need some serious memory then. Let's say around 192gb for having not all your memory eaten by your LLM.

> My conspiracy theory is that Apple recognizes this.

I don't think that's not a conspiracy theory. AFAIK, It's their stated AI policy...