Apple releases large cloud model for free to smaller developers
To boost use of its AI models enhanced with Google, Apple is allowing app developers to use them for free under certain circumstances. These are the conditions.
Logo of Apple's new AI foundation models: Catching up thanks to Google Gemini.
(Image: Apple)
Apple is visibly proud of its third-generation Apple Foundation Models (AFM): thanks to the combination of existing proprietary technology with Google's Gemini models, Siri AI and other artificial intelligence applications on iPhone, Mac, or iPad are finally supposed to be up-to-date. The various AFM-3 variants also offer advantages for developers: Apple also wants to make the cloud models – which are increasingly expensive at the competition – available free of charge under certain circumstances. According to Josh Shaffer, Senior Director for Platform Technologies at Apple, this applies regardless of whether it is a developer's first app or they have been around for a long time.
Better AI costs nothing at first
Anyone who needs AI functions in their application can even use the largest model, AFM 3 Cloud Pro, without paying for it. The prerequisite is that an app has fewer than two million first-time downloads in the App Store. This makes free use significantly easier to achieve than, for example, Apple's Small Business Developer Program, which involves a lower commission in the App Store if revenue is less than one million US dollars per year.
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API costs, according to Shaffer, are not incurred for AFM in the cloud. The models run with Apple's data protection system, Private Cloud Compute (PCC), where neither Apple nor third parties can view content. The system has so far only run on Apple's own AI servers but is now also being migrated to Google Cloud, where Nvidia chips are used. Apple has not yet provided further details on how much developers with over 2 million downloads will have to pay.
Apple was already generous before
Apple had previously made Apple Intelligence accessible to developers via APIs. The aim here was also to make the technology more popular. However, since Apple's models were technically behind OpenAI & Co., developers resorted to their offerings for more demanding tasks. The company now apparently wants to change this.
Apple offers a total of five new models. AFM 3 Core and AFM 3 Core Advanced run locally on devices, with three billion parameters and 20 billion respectively (as a “sparse” architecture that requires less memory). In the cloud, AFM 3 Cloud (standard model, “workhorse”), ADM 3 Cloud (Image) (for image generation and editing) and the aforementioned AFM 3 Cloud Pro run. The latter is intended for “complex reasoning” and, for the first time, agentic tool use. Developers can already try out the models as part of the current developer beta phase of iOS 27, macOS 27 & Co.
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