Scale By The Bay 2019: Erik Reppel, Hack Weekend: ML models on mobile
ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference ML models are increasingly deployed on phones, but what does it actually take to go from a state of the art model in Python to running that model on a phone? Spoiler alert: a lot. Erik recaps his weekend of attempting to go from 0 mobile development or on device model experience to running GPT-2 in an iOS app, covering the problems he encountered using Core ML/Onnx/TFLite, how to solve those problems, and why Swift for TensorFlow has the potential to change everything. Erik Reppel ML Platform Engineer, Coinbase Erik Reppel is an engineer on the Machine Learning and Platform team at Coinbase where he primarily works on improving the quality of ML tooling and deploying ML models at scale.