Credit: VentureBeat made with Midjourney

When it comes to generative AI, Apple’s efforts have seemed largely concentrated on mobile — namely Apple Intelligence running on iOS 18, the latest operating system for the iPhone.

But as it turns out, the new Apple M4 computer chip — available in the new Mac Mini and Macbook Pro models announced at the end of October 2024 — is excellent hardware for running the most powerful open source foundation large language models (LLMs) yet released, including Meta’s Llama-3.1 405B, Nvidia’s Nemotron 70B, and Qwen 2.5 Coder-32B.

In fact, Alex Cheema, co-founder of Exo Labs, a startup founded in March 2024 to (in his words) “democratize access to AI” through open source multi-device computing clusters, has...