I know apple is methodical and don’t show their hand but I cannot help but feel they are releasing all this research because they haven’t integrated any into the phone or provided a compelling AI functionality for their users. This is their only way to say “hey we are good with AI too”.
Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
101–110 of 210 posts
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#102Here is my question… This is the first time that millions of people will actually download and run a model on their own devices. The question is… will Apple be constantly tweaking these models, or only during OS upgrades? I for one really like local software. Call me old-fashioned, but I enjoy when a company doesn’t switch up software anytime on the server, or phone the results home all the time in order to extract m…
> The question is… will Apple be constantly tweaking these models, or only during OS upgrades? Certainly when new updates are released--going from macOS 26 to 26.1). They can probably push model updates between releases if necessary.
Per the PDF in this post:
> “Adapters produced by the toolkit are fully compatible with the Foundation Models framework. However, each adapter is compatible with a single specific model version, meaning that a new adapter must be trained for each new version of the base model.”
Any changes should require retraining any LoRA adapters that has been built & distributed by third party developers, so they wouldn’t update the models outside OS updates at the drop of a hat I don’t think.
LoRA adapters can be distributed via Background Assets, but the base model itself should be version-locked to the OS build (e.g. iOS 26.0 → 26.1) and updates only when Apple ships a new OS image.
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#103All I can say is, I asked Siri today (verbatim): What is 75 degrees fahrenheit in celsius, and what is 85 degrees in fahrenheit — and it offered a web search about fahrenheit. The "and" completely disabled its most basic ability to do metric conversions. So, it's nice to see Apple is doing research and talking about it, but we're out here waiting, still waiting, for anything useful to make of it all on our thousand-d…
You asked 2 questions in a system made for 1 question at a time. Split these up and Siri answers them fine. You’re holding it wrong.
"You haven't contorted your comically simple query enough to make the brittle tool work. Throw the chicken bones better next time."
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#104The more I think about Apple, the more I realize that Apple is so far behind. While other companies are pushing the envelope (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google ..) Apple's ambitions seem much much smaller. And this is after they made very big claims with Apple Intelligence last year, when they had everyone fooled. This is like watching a train-wreck in slow motion.
I think it's the right strategy for Apple.
They're not a model company. The risks of deploying something half-baked to their users is unacceptable. They're taking it slow and trying to do it in a way that doesn't damage/erode their brand.
Wait it out, let the best model(s) rise to the surface (and the hallucination problems to get sufficiently mitigated), and then either partner with a proprietary provider or deploy one of the open source models. Makes more sense than burning billions of dollars training a new foundation model
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#105All I can say is, I asked Siri today (verbatim): What is 75 degrees fahrenheit in celsius, and what is 85 degrees in fahrenheit — and it offered a web search about fahrenheit. The "and" completely disabled its most basic ability to do metric conversions. So, it's nice to see Apple is doing research and talking about it, but we're out here waiting, still waiting, for anything useful to make of it all on our thousand-d…
You asked 2 questions in a system made for 1 question at a time. Split these up and Siri answers them fine. You’re holding it wrong.
Never mind that Infocom games running on my Apple ][+ could handle that sort of command in 1983.
(Well, with multiple direct objects, anyway.)
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gotta polish that fig-leaf to hide Apple's real stance towards user privacy: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-secretly-giving-governments-push-notification-data/ > Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information,"
I mean if you throw out all contrary examples, I suppose you are left with the simple lack of nuance you want to believe
All examples contrary to what? Admitting to being muzzled by feds?
Take all the space you need to lay out your contrary case. Did the San Bernadino shooter predict this?
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#107The more I think about Apple, the more I realize that Apple is so far behind. While other companies are pushing the envelope (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google ..) Apple's ambitions seem much much smaller. And this is after they made very big claims with Apple Intelligence last year, when they had everyone fooled. This is like watching a train-wreck in slow motion.
I think it's the right strategy for Apple. They're not a model company. The risks of deploying something half-baked to their users is unacceptable. They're taking it slow and trying to do it in a way that doesn't damage/erode their brand. Wait it out, let the best model(s) rise to the surface (and the hallucination problems to get sufficiently mitigated), and then either partner with a proprietary provider or deploy…
Exactly. Another mobile.me moment that adversely impacts customers is worse than making something useful that works. Anyone that “needs” AI can use an app.
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#108Despite all the “Apple is evil” or “Apple is behind” (because they don’t do evil). Well, what they made with the Foundation Model is great. The fact that they build a system within the Swift language that allows you to specify structured data models (structs) to be used like any other model in a modern programming language, and you actually get back generated data in that format is great. Unlike a lot of other AIs wh…
Apple is behind. People forget that Google was shipping mobile-scale transformer-based LLMs in 2019: https://github.com/google-research/bert
By the time Apple has an AI-native product ready, people will already associate it with dehumanization and fascism.
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is entirely morally consistent to provide alt text for accessibility even if you personally dislike it being used to train AI models.
It's fine if you want to, but I think they should consider that basically nobody is reading it. If it was important for society, photo apps would prompt you to embed it in the image like EXIF. Computer vision is getting good enough to generate it; it has to be, because real-world objects don't have alt text.
I actually use Claude to generate the first draft of most of my alt text, but I still do a manual review of it because LLMs usually don't have enough contents to fully understand the message I'm trying to convey with an image: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/accessibility-and-gen-a...
Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Guided generation is called "Structured Output" by other providers? Well partially generated content streaming thing is great and I haven't seen it anywhere else.
An issue with this is that model quality can get a lot lower when you force it into a structured form, because it's out of distribution for the model. (I'm pretty sure this is actually what drove Microsoft Sydney insane.) Reasoning models can do better at this, because they can write out a good freeform output and then do another pass to transform it.
I have this toy agent I'm writing, I always laugh that I, human, write a code that generates human-readable markdown, that I feed to llm where I ask it to produce a json, so I can parse (by code I, or it wrote) and output in a consistent human-readable form.
I'm thinking about let it output freeform and then use another model to use to force that into structured.