Running a serious AI model on your phone has, until now, been a bit like trying to fit a grand piano through a cat flap. But a startup called PrismML appears to have found a way to make the piano smaller without losing too many keys, and Apple is reportedly sitting across the table from them trying to figure out what a deal might look like.
According to a report from The Information, Apple has held discussions with PrismML about integrating the startup’s model compression technology into iPhones. The conversations are exploratory, with no formal agreement or deployment timeline confirmed.
Shrinking a 54 GB model to fit in your pocket
Here’s what PrismML actually did. They took Alibaba’s Qwen 3.6, a 27 billion parameter AI model that weighs in at roughly 54 GB, and compressed it to under 4 GB. In English: they took something that would barely fit on most laptops and made it run seamlessly on an iPhone 17 Pro.
The company’s approach relies on extreme quantization, a technique that reduces the precision of the numbers used to represent a neural network’s weights. PrismML pushes this to the logical extreme, producing commercially viable 1-bit models. Their Bonsai 27B 1-bit variant clocks in at approximately 3.9 GB, while a ternary version sits around 5.9 GB and targets laptops.
