AFM 3 splits into 20B on-device sparse (NAND-to-DRAM weight loading) and Cloud Pro on Google Cloud NVIDIA GPU. Three Google contexts, Foundation Models API opening, and what's still unreleased.
Tested LFM2.5-1.2B-JP-202606 on M1 Max 64GB. llama.cpp Q4_K_M: 208 tok/s decode, JSON intact, model name hallucinated (LFM→FDM). Q8_0: 157 tok/s, no hallucination. Tool calls broken via GGUF.
Liquid AI's LFM2.5 uses a hybrid of short-range convolutions and attention, achieving edge optimization without SSMs. This article covers the architecture, benchmarks, and community use cases.
