Run Phi 4 on Mac
General-purpose reasoning assistant from the Phi 4 14B family excelling at science
Phi 4 runs 100% private on Mac inside Private LLM — no internet connection required, no data sent to any server.
Model on Hugging Face
Specifications
- Parameters
- 14.7B
- Context window
- 16K tokens
- License
- MIT
- Quantization
- GPTQ-Int4
- Family
- Phi 4 14B
What Phi 4 is good at
Phi 4 is a 14-billion-parameter model with a 16,384-token context window, trained on carefully filtered public data and synthetic “textbook-like” material to follow instructions reliably. It comes from the Phi family of compact, reasoning-focused assistants. The model is notably good at graduate-level science questions, earning a 56.1 on the GPQA benchmark and outperforming much larger models on that test.
Which of your devices can run it
Mac
How to run Phi 4 in Private LLM
- Download Private LLM from the App Store.
- Open the in-app model library and choose Phi 4.
- Download the model once, then chat fully offline.
Variants & related models
Airoboros l2 7b 3.0
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Airoboros M 7B
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Cat Llama 3 70B Instruct
Immersive roleplay via strict prompt adherence, Llama 3 70B finetune
FuseChat Gemma 2 9B Instruct
General-purpose assistant distilled from four larger models into Gemma 2 9B
FuseChat Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
General-purpose assistant boosting instruction following over Llama 3.1 8B
FuseChat Llama 3.2 1B Instruct
General compact assistant with sharp instruction following from multi-model distillation
Frequently asked questions
Phi 4 is too large for current iPhones. It runs on Mac with enough unified memory inside Private LLM, fully offline.
Yes. Phi 4 runs on Macs with enough unified memory, such as Mac (Apple Silicon, 192GB), MacBook Pro (M4 Max, 128GB), Mac Studio / Pro (Apple Silicon, 96GB), MacBook Pro (M4 Max, 64GB), MacBook Pro (M4 Max, 48GB), MacBook Pro (M4 Max, 36GB), Mac (Apple Silicon, 32GB), MacBook Air (M4, 24GB), MacBook Air (M-series, 16GB), fully on-device in Private LLM.
Yes. Once downloaded in Private LLM, Phi 4 runs 100% on-device — no internet connection, and nothing is sent to any server.
Private LLM is a one-time purchase with no subscription and no per-message cost. The models themselves are open source — once downloaded, they run offline with nothing to pay per use.
Why run Phi 4 in Private LLM
Private LLM has run local AI on iPhone, iPad, and Mac since 2023, well before Apple Intelligence, LM Studio, Ollama, etc. existed. Inference happens on your device, so your Phi 4 conversations never reach a server. The part most apps gloss over is quantization, and that is exactly where on-device quality is won or lost. Most llama.cpp and MLX wrappers ship the same off-the-shelf 4-bit RTN weights. Private LLM ships GPTQ and OmniQuant quantization, tuned per model, and our 3-bit OmniQuant models match or beat those 4-bit RTN builds on the same Apple Silicon. Run the same model both ways and you feel it in the first reply. See how our quantization works.
Specifications and summary come from Phi 4's Hugging Face model card, released under the MIT license. Private LLM ships its own quantized models, built with GPTQ-Int4 quantization tuned per model, and isn't affiliated with the model's authors.