Apple Foundation Models
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“for small models they are good”
“i am more excited about the ondevice foundation model update that is coming”
Show 1 more
“This is the whole appeal of Apple's Foundation models on iOS too.”
Caveats and dissent
“I've found some strange guardrails with the Foundation models. Like blocking describing of any photo with a single woman in it.”
“the AFM advanced or whatever its called (the 20B local one) sucks”
Show 2 more
“they just suck”
“Ok, then it might just be pretty bad at German Sie/Du.”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
From the makers not counted in the ranking
“I wrote a small library that exposes apple's LLMs in node”
Threads where it came up
- Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models 2 mentions
- Show HN: Apfel – The free AI already on your Mac 2 mentions
- Apple ML Research: Muse Spark Open with MLX on Mac Studio 1 mention
- Show HN: Pulse Local, a Mac budgeting app whose AI models run on your machine 1 mention
- Ask HN: Are you a subscribed LLM or a locally deployed open-source model? 1 mention
- Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back 1 mention
Also written as apple-foundation-models. Data: apple-foundation-models.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 15
“I've found some strange guardrails with the Foundation models. Like blocking describing of any photo with a single woman in it.”
“Why not leverage Apple Foundational models?”
“I’ve used Apple’s on device foundational models for parsing recipes and other small tasks”
“the AFM advanced or whatever its called (the 20B local one) sucks”
“fm = Foundation Models”
“they just suck”
“The model the device already has is best”
“Apple Foundation Models”
“for small models they are good”
“i am more excited about the ondevice foundation model update that is coming”
“It's a 3B Apple Foundation model.”
“This is the whole appeal of Apple's Foundation models on iOS too.”
“Ok, then it might just be pretty bad at German Sie/Du.”
“Apple model is nice since you don't need to download anything else”
“They're also available to other apps”