karimf

Thank you. This reminds me of a paragraph from the LatentSpace newsletter [0]

> The excellent on device capabilities makes one wonder if these are the basis for the models that will be deployed in New Siri under the deal with Apple….

https://www.latent.space/p/ainews-gemma-4-the-best-small-mul...

Thanks for sharing! I'm still torn about it. Sure it'll feel more natural if you have the AI head animation, but I don't want people to get attached to it. I don't want to make the loneliness epidemic even worse.

Thanks! Although, I can't claim any credit for it. I just spent a day gluing what other people have built. Huge props to the Gemma team for building an amazing model and also an inference engine that's focused for edge devices [0]

[0] https://github.com/google-ai-edge/LiteRT-LM

This app is cool and it showcases some use cases, but it still undersells what the E2B model can do.

I just made a real-time AI (audio/video in, voice out) on an M3 Pro with Gemma E2B. I posted it on /r/LocalLLaMA a few hours ago and it's gaining some traction [0]. Here's the repo [1]

I'm running it on a Macbook instead of an iPhone, but based on the benchmark here [2], you should be able to run the same thing on an iPhone 17 Pro.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1sda3r6/realtim...

[1] https://github.com/fikrikarim/parlor

[2] https://huggingface.co/litert-community/gemma-4-E2B-it-liter...

Update: Just made one that runs on Macbook M3 Pro https://github.com/fikrikarim/parlor

Nice project. I thought of building exactly this.

Since it's much easier to port source code to other languages now, I'd love to see more projects like written in Swift, or C#.

The big question is whether Apple can keep shipping new models constantly.

AFAIK the current model is on par with with Qwen-3-4B, which is from a year ago [0]. There's a big leap going from last year Qwen-3-4B to Qwen-3.5-4B or to Gemma 4.

Apple model is nice since you don't need to download anything else, but I'd rather use the latest model than to use a model from a year ago.

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...

Thank you for the kind words!

Ok it's on the app store now: https://apps.apple.com/app/volocal/id6761493288

I'm curious about the multimodal capabilities on the E2B and E4B and how fast is it.

In ChatGPT right now, you can have a audio and video feed for the AI, and then the AI can respond in real-time.

Now I wonder if the E2B or the E4B is capable enough for this and fast enough to be run on an iPhone. Basically replicating that experience, but all the computations (STT, LLM, and TTS) are done locally on the phone.

I just made this [0] last week so I know you can run a real-time voice conversation with an AI on an iPhone, but it'd be a totally different experience if it can also process a live camera feed.

https://github.com/fikrikarim/volocal

> In the coming days, we will also open-source smaller-scale variants, reaffirming our commitment to accessibility and community-driven innovation.

This is huge problem for developing countries. Most people here have $100-$200 phones. iPhone is a luxury.

> Do you think it the models you’re using could be quantized more that they could be downloaded on first run using Background Assets?

I first tried the Qwen 3.5 0.8B Q4_K_S and the model couldn't hold a basic conversation. Although I haven't tried lower quants on 2B.

I'm also interested on the Apple Foundation models, and it's something I plan to try next. AFAIK it's on par with Qwen-3-4B [0]. The biggest upside as you alluded to is that you don't need to download it, which is huge for user onboarding.

[0] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...

The Github repo is only for issue tracker

Is there anything special here vs. OpenCode or Codex?

There were/are a lot of discussions on how the harness can affect the output.

Oh thank you! I wasn’t sure if it was worth submitting to the app store since it was just a research preview, but I could do it if people want it.

Depending on the use case, the future is already here.

For example, last week I built a real-time voice AI running locally on iPhone 15.

One use case is for people learning speaking english. The STT is quite good and the small LLM is enough for basic conversation.

https://github.com/fikrikarim/volocal

Totally agree. There are significantly more new apps being released. I've been visiting the /r/macapps subreddit and they're having trouble filtering new submissions. I generally like the direction that they're taking https://www.reddit.com/r/macapps/comments/1ryaeex/rmacapps_m...

Even though it's more troublesome to submit apps to App Store, it's one signal that the app is not a malware.

Thank you!

> Projects hosted on Vercel benefit from platform-level protections that already block malicious request patterns associated with this issue.

https://vercel.com/changelog/cve-2025-55182

> Cloudflare WAF proactively protects against React vulnerability

https://blog.cloudflare.com/waf-rules-react-vulnerability/

When I saw "WIZ Research - Critical Vulnerabilities in React and Next.js" on the big image banner, I immediately thought that Wiz found the vulnerability.

Given that most Next.js and RSC apps run on Vercel, I’m wondering if they’re doing the same thing. There’s no information about this in their latest blog post [0].

Update: They do similar thing. Mentioned here [1]

[0] https://nextjs.org/blog/CVE-2025-66478

[1] https://vercel.com/changelog/cve-2025-55182

Dang, Cloudflare is moving fast. Cloudflare WAF proactively protects against React vulnerability https://blog.cloudflare.com/waf-rules-react-vulnerability/

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45963780

It's hard not to use Cloudflare at least for me: good products, "free" for small projects, and if Cloudflare is down no one will blame you since the internet is down.

I've been migrating all my personal stuff to Cloudflare. They have good products and good pricing.

At the same time I'm worried about how the internet is becoming even more centralized, which goes against how it was originally designed.

Self-hosting a free real-time AI app to help people practice speaking English

https://www.fikrikarim.com/bule-ai-initial-release

I've always thought about the best way to contribute to humanity: number of people you help x how much you help them. I think what Karpathy is doing is one of the highest leverage ways to achieve that.

Our current world is build on top of open source projects. This is possible because there are a lot of free resources to learn to code so anyone from anywhere in the world can learn and make a great piece of software.

I just hope the same will happen with the AI/LLM wave.

I agree with this. I’d prefer to have Meta be the steward for React instead of Vercel because Meta does not have a conflict of interest.

I think op is telling a similar story, not necessarily the same person.