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Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

machinelearning.apple.com

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Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#161

Post by mlnj »

ACCount36 wrote: post #157
darkoob12 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't believe Big Tech on their PR statements. They are decades behind in AI. I have been following AI research for a long time. You can find best papers published by Microsoft, Google, Facebook in past 15 years but not Apple. I don't know why but they didn't care about AI at all. I would say this is PR to justify their AI state.

Apple used to be at the edge of AI. They shipped Siri before "AI assistant" went mainstream, they were one of the first to ship an actual NPU in consumer hardware and put neural networks into features people use. They were spearheading computational photography. They didn't publish research, they're fucking Apple, but they did do the work. And then they just... gave up? I don't know what happened to them. When AI bre…

>I don't know what happened to them. When AI breakthrough happened, I expected them to put up a fight. They never did.

Apple always had the luxury of time. They work heavily on integrating deeply into their ecosystems without worrying about the pace of the latest development. eg. Widgets were a 2023 feature for iOS. They do it late, but do it well.

The development in the LLM space was and is too fast for Apple to compete in. They usually pave their own path and stay in their lane as a leader. The impact on Apple's brand image will be tarnished if Google, Meta, OpenAI, MS all leapfrog Apple's models every 2-3 months. That's just not what the Apple brand is associated with.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#162

Post by martinald »

alwillis wrote: post #94
martinald wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they have de facto admitted failure of most of the strategy if the rumours are true that they are switching much harder to OpenAI/Anthropic for upcoming LLM products. This is the first time in 10+ years I've seen Apple so far on the back foot. They usually launch category defining products that are so far ahead of the competition, even by the time they work through the 'drawbacks' in the first versions of them th…

> Private cloud is used AFIAK for virtually 0 use cases so far. Applications using Apple's foundation models can seamlessly switch from on-device models to Private Compute Cloud. Research is already showing the use of LLMs for people's most intimate relationship and medical issues. The usual suspects will try to monetize that, which why Private Cloud Compute is a thing from the jump. > Then they've got OpenAI/Gemini/…

8GB RAM is not enough for a semi-decent model IMO. 12/16GB is better (4GB for model and 8GB for OS) and really if you were going hard on device you'd probably want more like 32GB (24GB for model + 8GB for everything else - you'd be able to run a 13b param model with larger context size with that).

Even still though people are used to the quality of huge frontier models, so it will feel like a massive downgrade on many tasks. The _big_ problem with all this is chained tool calling. It uses context SO quickly and context needs a lot of (V)RAM. This also completely undermines the privacy argument you make, because it will need to ask personal data if using OpenAI and put it in the prompt.

Yes I noticed Apple shipping higher RAM but it will take years for this to feed through to a sizeable userbase, and people are quickly getting ingrained to use an app like ChatGPT instead of OS level features. Even more so given what a flop Apple Intelligence 1.0 has been.

The key problem they've got is they've went hard on privacy (which means it is hard to square that with going all in on 3rd party APIs) but they've also been incredibly stingy with RAM historically, which really nerfs their on device options. Private compute is an interesting middle ground but their model options are incredibly limited currently.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#163

Post by geoffpado »

jonplackett wrote: post #66
geoffpado wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model now available to developers (in beta, not in released versions of iOS) is the same model that powers stuff like the much-maligned notification summaries from iOS 18. So your phone does have features that are powered by this stuff… you may just not be particularly overwhelmed by those features.

That’s kinda my point though - is this only capable of things like this? If it ia capable of more, why isn’t there something more yet, it’s been a long time waiting…

My suspicion with playing with it in the developer betas is that, yes, this is what it’s capable of.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#164

Post by albumen »

jonplackett wrote: post #160
astrange wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main features are text summarization, search, and writing tools.

Yes, and these are all pointless. ‘Writing tools’ is there in the text pop up now instead of ‘look up’ even if you’re selecting text on a webpage. It’s just in the way and useless.

I agree. You can revert this UI frustration. Go to your settings. Then, go into screen time. Next, go into content and privacy restrictions and enable that. Under Apple intelligence in the restrictions you can then disable individual features.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#165

Post by lynx97 »

ACCount36 wrote: post #157
darkoob12 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't believe Big Tech on their PR statements. They are decades behind in AI. I have been following AI research for a long time. You can find best papers published by Microsoft, Google, Facebook in past 15 years but not Apple. I don't know why but they didn't care about AI at all. I would say this is PR to justify their AI state.

Apple used to be at the edge of AI. They shipped Siri before "AI assistant" went mainstream, they were one of the first to ship an actual NPU in consumer hardware and put neural networks into features people use. They were spearheading computational photography. They didn't publish research, they're fucking Apple, but they did do the work. And then they just... gave up? I don't know what happened to them. When AI bre…

> I don't know what happened to them.

Tim Cook happened. The fish rots from the head down.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#166

Post by al_borland »

jamesrcole wrote: post #152
al_borland wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A tool that can handle more than one question at a time is useful. Modern LLMs handle that with ease. So it's completely reasonable to be critical of that limitation.

Sure, what’s not reasonable is expecting Siri to be a modern LLM, when they know it’s not. They asked a question they knew Siri couldn’t handle just to slam it. I’m not critical of a 5-function calculator for not one-shotting complex equations like a computer.

While Siri only does one thing at a time, I trust the answer more, because it’s doing the actual math and not just guessing what the most likely answer is, like an LLM. We need to pick the right tool for the right job. Frankly, I don’t think an LLM is the right tool for conversations like this, and jumbling multiple questions into a single question is something people do with LLMs to get more use out of them during the day, this is an adaptation to a limitation of the free tier (and sometimes speed) of the LLM.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#167

Post by al_borland »

lxgr wrote: post #126
al_borland wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been this way for over a decade. If someone hasn’t figured it out by now, that’s kind of on them. I’m not even sure why those two things would be asked as a single question. It seems like a very unnatural way to pose those two questions. Most humans would trip on that, especially if it was asked verbally.

> It seems like a very unnatural way to pose those two questions. Most humans would trip on that I'd assume GP only gave an example. As a pretty frequent user, I can unfortunately only confirm that Siri trips over almost every multi-part question. This would be forgivable if there weren't multiple voice-based AI consumer products available that can handle these kinds of requests perfectly.

And Apple has integrated one of them, ChatGPT, to do just that.

If they wanted an LLM answer they could have got one. They went out of their way just to take shots at Apple.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#168

Post by danhau »

jamesrcole wrote: post #152
al_borland wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A tool that can handle more than one question at a time is useful. Modern LLMs handle that with ease. So it's completely reasonable to be critical of that limitation.

Why is Siri being discussed in the context of LLMs and Apple Intelligence? Have they already released Siri 2.0 or am I missing something?

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#169

Post by Angostura »

mittermayr wrote: post #35

All 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…

I just tried this on my phone and just got two pop ups with the conversions appear in quick succession.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#170

Post by lxgr »

imoverclocked wrote: post #145
lxgr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but why do I have to open a third-party app to do these things when Apple, the company that primarily popularized the entire genre of mobile voice assistants, could very feasibly bake all of that into theirs? I mean, the thing even lets me ask ChatGPT things if I explicitly ask it to! But why do I need to ask in the first place?

Excellent question. I don’t speak for Apple but certainly you can appreciate that there is a fine balance between providing basic functionality and providing apps. Apple works to provide tools that developers can leverage and also tries to not step on those same developers. Defining the line between what should be built-in and what should be add-on needs to be done carefully and often is done organically.

Are we talking about the same Apple whose behavior resulted in the expression “to Sherlock”?
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