MoE vs Edge AI: How a 35B Model Runs on an iPhone With Under 3GB RAM
A demo by a project called Edge0 showed a 35B-parameter language model running on an iPhone using just 1–2.5 GB of peak memory, sparking interest in how this is possible. The key technique is Mixture of Experts (MoE), a neural network architecture where multiple smaller sub-networks called 'experts' exist within a model, but only a few are activated for any given input token. This sparse activation means a model can have a large total parameter count while using far fewer parameters per computation, keeping active memory usage low. In Edge0's approach, the full set of expert weights is stored on the device's storage and only the required experts are loaded into RAM as needed. MoE is an architectural design choice, distinct from 'edge computing,' which refers to where computation runs — the two concepts are related in practice but solve fundamentally different problems.
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