The Locally AI application, developed by a Frenchman, now allows you to install the Ministral models on your iPhone to query the LLM without using servers. A taste of the future of the smartphone, 100% made in France.
A French language model executed on an iPhone using a French application?
From Locally AI, an application developed by Adrien Grondin which allows you to run LLMs locally on iPhone (including the Apple model, otherwise unavailable), it is now possible to install the Ministral models, just announced by the French Mistral AI at the beginning of December 2025. The objective is simple: have a language model in your pocket, without sending data to a server and accessible even in airplane mode.
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Ministral: intelligence made in France that works locally
From Locally AI, it is now possible to download Ministral, Adrien Grondin announced on Locally AI’s tweet also mentions compatibility with Ministral 8B and Ministral 14B, but only version 3B is offered on our iPhone. In any case, count a download of 2.78 GB, which corresponds to the size of the model.
Once Ministral 3B is installed, you can talk to the model like with ChatGPT or Gemini. The responses are generated in real time by the smartphone’s chip, which can heat up in certain cases. Ministral 3B also supports the recognition of images and documents: you can therefore send it attachments to ask it to analyze them. The responses are obviously not as precise as with Gemini 3 Pro or GPT-5.2, but that is not the goal of a local model.
In addition to Ministral, Locally AI allows you to test different open source models adapted to smartphones. Among them: Gemma (Google), Llama 3.2 (Meta), Qwen 3 (Alibaba), SmolLM (Hugging Face) or Apple Foundation, which powers Apple Intelligence functions. Mistral AI has two advantages: it excels in Latin languages like French and knows how to optimize small models.
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According to our first tests, Ministral 3B on iPhone responds quickly, but is confusing a lot (spelling mistakes, comprehension errors, approximations, etc.). There remains a service that is worth it: in certain cases, having an AI permanently accessible can be useful.
For older iPhones and Android smartphones, Mistral offers its own application, Le Chat, to query its models. But then we go through its servers, nothing is local.
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