Khosla-Backed Startup Claims Breakthrough With Largest-Ever AI Model on an iPhone

Apple is on a quest to shrink powerful AI models to run on iPhones, which could cut down on cloud computing costs and enhance user privacy. But a small startup that emerged from stealth mode earlier this year says it recently got an AI model running on an iPhone bigger than any previous mobile model.

The startup, PrismML, said it has shrunk down Qwen 3.6, an open-source large language model developed by Chinese internet giant Alibaba, to run on an iPhone 17 Pro. The model has 27 billion parameters, which are roughly similar to the synapses in a brain and can help determine the complexity of the data a model can process. In contrast, most models that run on mobile phones have only a few billion parameters active at a time.