The Hallway Track
36 tracked signals on foundation-models.
Apple rebuilt Apple Intelligence on Google Gemini technology to power its new Foundation Models.
“Working together with Google and leveraging the technologies behind their Gemini family of models, we created the latest Apple Foundation Models for our integrated Apple Intelligence experiences.”
Apple's latest Foundation Models are now built with Google, leveraging Gemini technology to power Apple Intelligence.
“Working together with Google and leveraging the technologies behind their Gemini family of models, we created the latest Apple Foundation models to power our Apple intelligence experiences”
Sequoia urges portfolio companies to own AI model weights, not rent them from closed providers
“companies want to own their intelligence. They want to own not rent their weights.”
Apple unveils integrated AI platform at WWDC26 with Xcode 27 agentic coding and new on-device frameworks.
“At Apple, AI isn't a layer you bolt on. It's integrated into our platforms.”
Apple opens its Foundation Models framework to Private Cloud Compute and third-party models like Gemini and Claude.
“This year, we're offering developers access to our Private Cloud Compute as well. So you'll have access to a very powerful server model, the one that actually powers our Apple Intelligence features, as well as access to third-party models like Gemini and Claude from Anthropic.”
Biohub commits $500M to open-source AI virtual biology models, having folded 1.1 billion proteins.
“We folded over 1.1 billion proteins and predicted their structures.”
Apple opens its Foundation Models framework to nearly any LLM via a new open-source Language Model protocol.
“Anthropic and Google will soon extend the Foundation Models framework with Swift packages of their own, making state-of-the-art Claude and Gemini models available to all Swift developers.”
Apple is open-sourcing the Foundation Models framework and adding cloud reasoning models plus third-party model access from Anthropic and Google.
“The Foundation Models framework, including many of the brand new APIs that we're announcing today, is going open source!”
Apple opens its Private Cloud Compute server LLM to third-party developers via the Foundation Models framework at WWDC26.
“And now, by changing just one line of code, you can switch to the new server model on PCC.”
Microsoft AI shipped seven first-party models including MAI Thinking One, its first frontier reasoning model.
“We call our approach humanist superintelligence.”
Microsoft announced 7 new from-scratch MAI models, including MAI-Thinking-1, at Build.
“MAI today is by no means an unqualified frontier lab, but it is a good tier 2 neolab with obvious incentives to support domain specific finetunes”
Dyna Robotics is building reliable, commercially deployable general-purpose manipulation policies, not just demos.
“Robot Demos Are Easy. Reliability Is Hard”
Apple launches zero-cost server LLM for developers via Private Cloud Compute with no API keys
“there are no token costs to you, the developer”
Chai Discovery is treating drug design as a scaling problem, prioritizing model simplicity over complexity
“one of the exciting things we're trying to do at Chai is to make the drug discovery process like a little bit more like engineering”
Apple's Foundation Models framework adds a language model protocol letting developers plug in third-party inference backends.
“We've got a Google package that just went live. Anthropic released theirs this morning.”
DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng built a competitive AI lab by stockpiling Nvidia A100s and reworking training to reduce GPU reliance after US export controls.
“Look, the way this works is we're going to tell you it's totally hopeless to compete with us on training foundation models. You shouldn't try, and it's your job to like try anyway. And I believe both of those things.”
Apple's Foundation Models framework now offers frictionless frontier-model access via Private Cloud Compute, plus agentic coding in Xcode.
“the ability to now just access one of these frontier models in Private Cloud Compute with basically no setup or friction at all”
Apple's WWDC26 Foundation Models framework adds DynamicProfile APIs and an open-source Utilities package for building agentic app experiences.
“You can think of this as swapping hats, or switching agents.”
Apple is adding an fm command-line tool and Python SDK to access on-device Foundation Models at WWDC26.
“We're introducing a new command line tool called fm, and a new Foundation Models SDK for Python.”
Apple's new Evaluations framework lets developers measure quality of generative-AI features powered by on-device models.
“These models break a contract that is fundamental to software testing.”
NVIDIA's NeMo tron offers fully open datasets, training techniques, and weights for enterprise customization.
“we provide the open data sets, the uh, the training techniques, the weights, so that it's fully transparent. You can customize it into your business.”
Plummeting sensor costs make dense physical-world data collection feasible for AI models
“More real-world data enables precise modeling, and once you can model a system, you can control it.”
TwelveLabs argues video AI needs a memory layer treating video as spatial-temporal volumes, not frame sequences
“video is not a bag of frames”
Altos Labs is applying foundation models to single-cell biology to model cellular rejuvenation and aging
“restore cell health and resilience through cellular rejuvenation to inverse disease and disabilities that can happen throughout the life”
Apple introduces SpotlightSearchTool, letting on-device LLMs search app content via Core Spotlight for grounded responses.
“today, we're introducing SpotlightSearchTool. It's a tool that adopts the tool protocol, to let a language model directly search your app's content in Core Spotlight for contextual response generation.”
Apple's Instruments now profiles Foundation Models apps, giving developers observability into on-device and server LLM agent loops.
“Traditional code is predictable. LLMs are non-deterministic - the same input can produce different outputs.”
Apple's WWDC26 adds image inputs to Foundation Models and a new Tap to Segment Vision API.
“this year Foundation Models is supporting image inputs”
Apple revised its Developer Program License Agreement to formalize AI/ML terms, including Foundation Models framework and access to Apple models.
Fundamental's NEXUS, a deterministic foundation model for tabular data, is now on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart.
“It's pre-trained on billions of real-world prediction tasks across structured datasets, so it arrives already knowing how to find signal in your data.”
Kumo's RFM2 performs in-context learning on new enterprise databases with zero training
Decathlon replaced weekly-retrained models with Chronos-2 foundation model for global demand forecasting
“would these models work on Decathlon's specific retail datasets?”
ONESTRUCTION built a BIM foundation model using synthetic data and RLVR to overcome niche data scarcity.
NeuroDX is building EEG-based foundation models to decode neurological disorders at scale
“NeuroDX was founded with the idea of being able to decode the language in which the brain is trying to speak.”
NPS and NVIDIA use DGX systems to train tailor-made foundational models for national security missions.
“Nvidia has now democratized these capabilities, so it's no longer in the province of just someone in computer science or just someone in operations research.”
NVIDIA outlines building a transaction foundation model to replace brittle hand-engineered features in financial data.
“Transaction data is one of the richest signals an enterprise owns.”
NVIDIA BioNeMo Recipes enables LoRA fine-tuning of biological foundation models like ESM2 and Evo 2.
“Foundation models are reshaping computational biology.”