Mobile AI news timeline
October 2026
September 2026
- FunctionGemma 270M fine-tune reaches 76.5% on 15 mobile actions, with an Android demo
- Google adds local model support to the Antigravity SDK with Gemma 4 on LiteRT
- Nvidia releases Nemotron-3-Diarization, a 100M speaker model with 0.32 second latency
- Perplexity brings its local Portable Computer agent to AMD Ryzen AI Max PCs
- Liquid AI releases a DSpark drafter that speeds up LFM2.5-VL-3B decoding
- Qualcomm positions Snapdragon X2 as an agentic PC chip and previews Linux support
- Hugging Face adds native GGUF inference to Transformers, starting with Qwen3.5 on Macs
- Apple launches M6 Mac mini and M5 Ultra Mac Studio for local AI
- MediaTek launches Dimensity CX C10 Max, a 55 TOPS chip for Googlebook
- Qualcomm launches Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 for 30B-parameter AI
- Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite powers the first Googlebook laptops from Dell and HP
- OPPO unveils ColorOS 17 with an on-device linear-attention model and 128K context
- vivo previews BlueCode phone coding agent and researches a 30B MoE on-device model
- Arm recaps Arm Create China and shows Qwen3-TTS 0.6B running on a vivo X300 CPU
- Arm unveils CSS for Mobile 2 with C2 CPU cluster, up to 1.7x faster on AI models
- Arm unveils Mali G2-Ultra NX GPU with neural accelerators in every shader core
- MediaTek launches Dimensity 9600 Pro, a 2nm chip for on-device models up to 30B parameters
- Cactus releases Needle 3, a 121M-parameter tool-calling model in an 8 to 29 MB binary
- Prism ML releases Bonsai 2 27B for iPhone, iPad and Mac, with a 3.9 GB 1-bit version
- ASUS announces Ascent QN10, a mini PC with Snapdragon X2 Elite and an 80 TOPS NPU
- Edge0 releases MoE expert-offloading framework, demos 35B model on iPhone
- llama.cpp Hexagon NPU backend tested on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 phone
- Qualcomm teases next-gen Hexagon NPU ahead of Snapdragon Summit 2026
- iPhone 18 Pro: A20 Pro adds a dual 16-core Neural Engine
- Google releases ADK for Kotlin 1.0 with on-device agents for Android
- Desert Ant Labs releases 18 on-device models for speech, audio and privacy tasks
- OpenBMB releases MiniCPM5-2B for local deployment
- PalmClaw is an open-source agent framework that runs natively on Android phones
August 2026
- Google lists first Gemini Nano 4 phones, requires Nano 3 for Gemini Intelligence
- Artificial Analysis benchmarks 33 local models on an iPhone 17 Pro
- Graphcore runs Llama 3.2 11B Vision on a Pixel 8a with 2.7-bit quantisation
- Ornith releases Ornith-1.5, a 9B model with a mobile build for iPhone and Android
- S2-MoE speeds up MoE decoding by up to 5.3x in llama.cpp
- Online-SDFT reports 70.28% routing accuracy and updates a LoRA adapter on the phone
- Pixel Watch 5 adds offline Gemini commands and faster on-device smart replies
- Pixel 11 series: Tensor G6 adds 50 percent more TPU compute
- RikkaHub Agent test: Android phone agent compiles whisper.cpp on its own
- Liquid AI releases LFM2.5-2.6B for on-device agents
July 2026
- Gemini Nano 4 ships on Samsung foldables with ML Kit Prompt API access
- MobiBench paper benchmarks small LLMs in llama.cpp on two laptops and an RTX 3060
- Prism ML releases Bonsai 27B, a 3.9 GB 1-bit model that fits an iPhone 17 Pro
- FBLayout fine-tunes transformers on phone GPUs 2.2 to 5.7 times faster
- NPUs lead LLM prefill, CPUs lead decoding on Snapdragon phones
June 2026
- Google adds multi-token prediction to Gemini Nano v3 on Pixel 9 and 10
- Qualcomm CEO says agents will become the new app, cites more than 40 device designs
- MLPerf Mobile v6.0 adds Llama tests in 1B, 3B and 8B sizes
- llada.cpp runs a diffusion LLM on a Snapdragon NPU up to 42 times faster
- CAPED redacts phone screenshots before a cloud GUI agent sees them
May 2026
- Apertus Mini distils an open-data 8B into 0.5B, 1.5B and 4B models
- Meta AI builds MobileMoE, 5.3B parameters with 0.9B active per token
- Prism ML releases Bonsai Image 4B, a 1-bit image model that runs on iPhone
- LiteRT-LM reports 52 decode tokens per second for Gemma 4 E2B on an Android GPU
- Quant.npu runs 4-bit LLMs up to 15.1 percent faster on a Qualcomm NPU
April 2026
- Tencent open-sources a 440 MB offline translation model for phones
- Airgap is a React Native kit for support chatbots that answer offline
- Prism ML releases Ternary Bonsai, 1.58-bit models with an 8B version at 1.75 GB
- Tempo compresses hour-long video with a 2B vision model so a 4B LLM can answer
- Gemma 4 lands on the edge with Agent Skills in Google AI Edge Gallery
March 2026
- Prism ML releases 1-bit Bonsai 8B, an 8.2B-parameter model that needs 1.15 GB
- iPhone 16 Pro settles 41.5 percent below peak over 20 back-to-back prompts
- Meta's MobileLLM-Flash goes shallow and wide for 1.8 times faster prefill
- FlexServe runs on-device LLM inference inside TrustZone for 4.41 percent more latency
- Alibaba adds 0.8B and 2B sizes to Qwen3.5, with 262K context and a vision encoder
February 2026
- ClawMobile tries system commands before screen taps and finishes all six test tasks
- Apple ships Python bindings for the on-device Foundation Models framework
- Alibaba releases GUI-Owl-1.5 agent models from 2B to 32B under MIT
- Show HN: Off Grid runs text, image, vision and speech models offline on phones
January 2026
November 2025
October 2025
September 2025
August 2025
July 2025
June 2025
May 2025
- Vijay Janapa Reddi argues edge generative AI needs models under 1B parameters
- Gemma 3n runs 5B and 8B models in 2 GB and 3 GB of memory
- Google AI Edge Gallery runs Gemma 3 1B and Qwen2.5 offline on Android
- Alibaba gives Qwen3's 0.6B and 1.7B models a reasoning switch
- Google's ML Drift runs Llama 3.1 8B on a phone GPU at 12.7 tokens per second
April 2025
March 2025
- HuggingSnap describes what the iPhone camera sees with a 500M model on the phone
- ROMA keeps a 4-bit 3B model in on-chip ROM and reports 31,800 tok/s in synthesis
- Gemma 3 adds a 1B size that fits in 0.5 GB as an int4 checkpoint
- Flower Intelligence runs models on device, with remote handoff off by default
- Raspberry Pi 5 beats human reading speed only up to Phi 3.5 mini
February 2025
January 2025
December 2024
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
- AMD trains its first small language model, AMD-Llama-135M, on MI250 accelerators
- Meta ships Llama Stack with Swift and Kotlin clients for on-device inference
- Meta releases Llama 3.2 1B and 3B for phones and edge devices
- CoMiGS splits on-device fine-tuning into shared generalists and private specialists
- ElastiLM resizes a shared phone LLM per request and switches in 0.31 seconds
- Ai2 releases OLMoE, 7B parameters with 1B active per token
July 2024
- Gemma 2 2B is distilled from a larger model and scores 1126 on Chatbot Arena
- torchchat runs Llama 3 8B on a Galaxy S23 and iPhone at more than 8 tok/s
- Spectra ships ternary 3.9B models that match 4-bit quantisation at half the bits
- Hugging Face releases SmolLM at 135M, 360M and 1.7B parameters
- Alibaba builds Qwen2's 0.5B and 1.5B sizes for phones, earphones and glasses
- llm.npu prefills 1,106 tok/s for Qwen1.5-1.8B on a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
June 2024
- Apple's MobileCLIP-S0 encodes an image in 1.5 ms on an iPhone 12 Pro Max
- TensorOpera releases Fox-1, a 1.6B model trained on 3 trillion tokens
- BUPT measures 22 LLMs on four Android phones at about 200 ms per token
- Apple Intelligence pairs a 3-billion-parameter on-device model with a server model
- PowerInfer-2 runs a 47B model on a OnePlus 12 at 11.68 tokens per second
May 2024
April 2024
- ExecuTorch alpha runs Llama 2 7B on iPhone 15 Pro and Galaxy phones
- Apple releases OpenELM at 270M to 3B, with parameters spread unevenly across layers
- Microsoft runs Phi-3-mini offline on an iPhone 14 at over 12 tokens per second
- Octopus v3 picks an action from an image and a query in under 1B parameters
- Octopus v2 is a 2B model that calls Android APIs with one token per function
- Octopus fine-tunes a 2B model to 93 percent on API function calls
March 2024
February 2024
- MeRino designs sub-100M language models that run 4.9 times faster than OPT-350M
- Stability AI trains Stable LM 2 1.6B on seven languages and 2 trillion tokens
- BitNet b1.58 gives every weight three values and runs 3B in 2.22 GB
- MobiLlama is a fully transparent 0.5B model that runs in 770 MB on a phone
- Qualcomm AI Hub opens 75 pre-optimised models and profiling on hosted Snapdragon phones
- Meta's MobileLLM trades width for depth and gains 2.7 and 4.3 points
- TinyLLaVA's 3.1B model outscores 7B LLaVA-1.5 on seven of nine benchmarks
- Gemma 2B and 7B open the Gemma line, built on Gemini research
- MobileVLM V2 runs 1.7B, 3B and 7B vision models on 144 image tokens
January 2024
December 2023
- Microsoft releases Phi-2, a 2.7B model it says matches models 25 times larger
- Apple researchers run models twice the size of available DRAM from flash
- Stability AI releases StableLM Zephyr 3B for edge devices
- Gemini Nano ships on the Pixel 8 Pro and Android gets AICore
- Apple publishes MLX, where CPU and GPU share arrays without copies
- LLM.swift wraps llama.cpp for on-device text generation in Swift apps