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Pocket Experts: MobileMoE and the Memory Math of On-Device AI

Phones have memory. They also have batteries, thermal limits, app sandboxes, operating-system overhead, impatient users, and the charming habit of becoming hand warmers when developers pretend they are cloud GPUs with a smaller logo. That is the business problem behind MobileMoE, a paper that studies whether Mixture-of-Experts language models can work in the sub-billion-active-parameter regime for on-device deployment.1 The usual MoE story belongs to giant models: add many experts, activate a few, keep per-token compute low, and let the cloud hardware worry about the rest. MobileMoE asks a less fashionable but more commercially useful question: can the same sparse principle survive inside the memory and latency budget of a smartphone? ...

June 6, 2026 · 14 min · Zelina