>Knowledge distillation works like this: you take a large model, have it perform tasks with detailed reasoning, then feed those reasoning traces to a smaller model until the student learns to mimic the teacher. The smaller model ends up far more capable than if you’d trained it from scratch on the same data. Apple can now do this with the full Gemini, not just their own in-house models, and the distilled output runs locally. No internet required.

No freaking way. AI companies see this as tantamount to pirating their models. There is no way that Google is not explicitly banning this in their agreement to allow Apple use their models.

> Obviously, the average consumer has no idea what that sentence means, and Apple hasn’t figured out how to make them care.

the article also does nothing to show how or why consumers should care.

> Gartner projects GenAI smartphone spending will reach $393 billion in 2026, up 32% from $298 billion in 2025.

is this because consumers are interested in "GenAI" smartphones, or because every smartphone manufacturer has decided to tack "AI" onto every piece of their branding and there's just no way around it?

I am looking forward to more capable phones able to run on device AI models. I prefer my phone to be still useful even without internet. Since Apple is using Gemini models to do this, do you think there is a chance Pixel phones will be part of the able to run models on devices, in their next updates?

I have been craving for a small, extremely accurate voice model for a year. Having that would be an absolute game changer because I think that's the inflection point where people start interacting with their devices primarily through audio.