As evidenced by much of the research material Apple has released in recent months, the company is investing heavily in all kinds of artificial intelligence technology. Apple is expected to announce its AI strategy as part of iOS 18 and other new OS versions at his WWDC in June.
In the latest Power On newsletter, Mark Gurman says he expects any new AI features on the iPhone to be powered by large-scale language models on the device, offline, developed by Apple. . We can expect Apple to tout the privacy and speed benefits of this approach.
9to5Mac previously discovered code references in iOS 17.4 that refer to an on-device model called “Ajax.” Apple is also working on a server-hosted version of Ajax.
The downside to on-device LLMs is that they cannot be as powerful as models running on huge server farms with tens of billions of parameters and data constantly updated behind the scenes.
But Apple engineers could probably take advantage of the platform's full-stack vertical integration, with software tailored to the Apple silicon chips inside the device, to take full advantage of an on-device approach. On-device models are typically much faster to respond than trafficking requests through cloud services, and they also have the advantage of being able to work offline in locations with no or limited connectivity.
On-device LLM may not have a built-in rich knowledge database like ChatGPT to answer all sorts of random trivia questions, but it's tuned to be very competent at many tasks. can. For example, it is conceivable that on-device LLM could generate sophisticated automated responses to messages or improve the interpretation of many common Siri requests.
This fits right in with Apple's strict adherence to privacy. Since the data is kept locally, there is no problem in processing all downloaded emails and text messages via an on-device model.
On-device models may also be able to perform generative AI tasks, such as creating documents or images, based on prompts, with appropriate results. Apple also still has the flexibility to partner with companies like Google to fall back to something like Gemini on servers for certain tasks.
We'll find out what Apple has planned when it officially unveils its AI strategy at WWDC. The keynote will begin on June 10th, where the company will announce all new software features coming to iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and more.
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