Tiny Aya: 70 Languages Running Locally on iPhone and Mac
February 28, 2026 · 6 min read
Most “multilingual” AI models treat language support as a checkbox — train heavily on English, sprinkle in some Chinese and Spanish, and list 100+ languages in the marketing copy. Cohere Labs just shipped something different. Tiny Aya, released February 17, is a 3.35-billion-parameter open-weight model that genuinely supports 70+ languages — including Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Yoruba, and dozens of others that frontier models treat as afterthoughts — and runs locally on an iPhone 17 Pro at 32 tokens per second. GGUF versions are available on Hugging Face right now, making it immediately usable for local inference on iPhone and Mac.