On-device AI agents hit a hard memory limit. Apple's new architecture routes around it.

Source: ventureBeat June 9, 2026 · 10:49
On-device AI models have stayed small because the entire weight set has to live in DRAM, capping practical parameter counts well below what server-side deployments use. Enterprise architects evaluating agentic workloads have had to choose between capable cloud-dependent models and limited on-device ones. Apple's third-generation foundation models, announced at WWDC26, break that constraint by moving the weight set off DRAM entirely.The AFM 3 family was developed in collaboration with Google and spans five models: two on-device and three server-based, all running within Apple's Private Cloud Compute boundary. The server-side models, including AFM 3 Cloud Pro for agentic tool use and complex reasoning, run on Nvidia GPUs in Google Cloud. The on-device architecture is Apple's own. AFM 3 Core …

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