I would love to learn more about what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now. Are they using flagship Gemini models behind their own prompts? Fine-tuning? Pre-training their own models based on Gemini?

Is there a meaningful distinction between the Gemini-powered models and Apple Foundation Models? Does that distinction vary for on-device vs hosted models? Are some models running on Apple's Private Cloud Compute and others running on Google iron?

Edit: they elaborated significantly in a "keynote tech-talk": [0]

According to Apple, there are five models:

On-Device

- AFM Core: Dense architecture; the standard next-gen on-device model

- AFM Core Advanced: Sparse architecture, natively multimodal; enables features like image understanding and expressive voices

Private Cloud Compute

- AFM Cloud: Workhorse server model optimized for latency and cost

- AFM Cloud Image: Image generation and editing

- AFM Cloud Pro: Most capable model, Gemini frontier-level quality, for complex reasoning and agentic tasks; runs on NVIDIA GPUs in Google's cloud under Apple's PCC privacy guarantees

Everything excluding Cloud Pro are custom models running on Apple Silicon, "refined" using Google Gemini. About Cloud Pro, they say "this is our most capable model with quality similar to Gemini frontier models." So I might read between the lines and say this is a wrapped Gemini.

  [0]: https://9to5mac.com/2026/06/08/craig-federighi-details-apples-collaboration-with-google-for-siri-ai-in-ios-27/

> what's actually powering Apple Intelligence now.

It's a 3B Apple Foundation model.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...

If you've got a mac, you can use this to play around with it:

https://apfel.franzai.com/

Local is probably similar to Gemma e4b you can get right now on Google Edge Gallery (the ios and Android app). Guessing that the more powerful version that will only work on the 12gb ram devices will be something unreleased that is similar but a bit larger

Google also awhile back announced being able to run full Gemini by leasing / renting hardware in your own datacenters so companies can train or access data without needing to send things to their datacenters. Nvidia based. Guessing Private Compute might just be Apple leasing a ton of those?

Am I reading this correctly? Their chosen cloud providers run the PCC stack on their hardware, so the compute provider is responsible for ensuring the privacy guarantees? I assume that would add to the potential security surface area.

Gemini (at least public free version) hallucinates way too much. If it's like that, it can go very badly for Apple.