My gut feel is the former but not sure if that's actually true.
So due to hardware capabilities the iPhone 20 Pro gets an X billion parameter version but the regular 20 gets only gets (2/3 * X) billion?
That would provide an interesting point of hardware differentiation between the regular and pro models, as well as between each model year.
“We’re proud to announce that the iPhone 21 is our most performant iPhone yet - capable of running models of up to 20 billion parameters. That’s over 2x the amount on iPhone 20.”
Or something like that.
All of us know phones are basically fast enough and have been for a long time. The screens are already great. The cameras are great. It’s gotten harder and harder to get people to break their cycle of when they upgrade.
I don’t work in AI, I don’t know the parameter thing well myself. Like I know what it is abstractly, but I have no idea if doubling the number makes things 0.3% better, 12% better, or 2000% better. You could try to turn it into just some generic benchmark like the old megahertz race of “bitness” of consoles. But I suspect it means about as much to the average person as saying how many BOGOMIPS a phone has.