Apple

Increasingly capable local models (like Llama 3.2 1b & 3b) make me very optimistic about inference at the edge - mostly because of cost. 

However, I worry about how limited they’ll be if Apple continues to disallow any kind of meaningful background processing on iOS.

Multidisciplinary software engineer. First Citizen of The Internet. Building @gandalf.

I’m playing around with a NotebookLM podcast generator type knock off and even if there was a local tts model that was lightweight enough, the user would still have to wait ~3-5 mins without closing the app for a podcast to be generated.

The solution is probably just MUCH faster local models. Apple has never allowed meaningful background processing and yet, apps do a lot of cool, previously considered time consuming things.

But they’ll always have an “unfair”advantage for their own offerings.