MacPaw и Liquid AI запустят локальный ИИ-инференс для разработчиков Setapp

MacPaw, the developer of CleanMyMac and the Setapp subscription service, announced a partnership with Liquid AI on August 5, 2026: the company's AI assistant Eney will gain a local operating mode based on Liquid AI models — for developers building applications within the MacPaw ecosystem.

What Eney Is and Why Local Inference Matters

Eney is MacPaw's AI assistant, integrated into the Setapp ecosystem. Like most cloud-based AI tools, it processes requests on the company's servers. Local inference changes this: the language model runs directly on the user's device, and data never leaves the machine.

According to TechCrunch, this is exactly the version of Eney that MacPaw is building — powered by Liquid AI models. Liquid AI specializes in compact language models that run efficiently on consumer devices: laptops, tablets, smartphones — without a powerful GPU and without a cloud connection.

What Developers Will Get from This Partnership

The primary audience for this initiative is not end users, but developers building apps for Setapp. Currently, to embed an AI feature into an application, a developer pays for tokens from a cloud provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, or another. Local Eney with API access changes the equation: AI computations run on the user's machine, token payments become a thing of the past, and privacy is guaranteed by architecture.

For MacPaw, this is an opportunity to distinguish Setapp from competing platforms: offering developers an ecosystem with built-in private AI at no additional infrastructure cost.

• Partnership announcement: August 5, 2026
• Technology: Liquid AI language models, on-device inference
• Target audience: developers of applications for the MacPaw / Setapp ecosystem
• Key advantage: data is processed locally, without being sent to the cloud

Who Liquid AI Is and Why Them

Liquid AI is an American startup founded by alumni of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The company develops language models on a non-transformer architecture — Liquid Neural Networks (LNN). These models are smaller and run faster on consumer hardware compared to classical transformers, making them attractive for on-device scenarios.

As Apple embeds Apple Intelligence directly into iOS and macOS, and Meta and Google promote their own edge models, Liquid AI occupies the niche of a "neutral" provider of compact LLMs for independent platforms. The partnership with MacPaw is confirmation: independent ecosystems are also entering the local AI market.

As

TechCrunch reports, MacPaw is building a local version of Eney specifically for developers in its app store — to give them access to AI capabilities directly on the user's device, without relying on the cloud.

What This Means

On-device AI is no longer the exclusive domain of large platforms like Apple and Google. MacPaw demonstrates that an independent app store can also embed local inference into its ecosystem — and turn it into a competitive advantage for developers.

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