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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

#181

Post by pjmlp »

ipnon wrote: post #146
LeicaLatte wrote: post #144

This isn’t the Apple I remember. Product integration falls apart at every seam, but don’t worry—we’ve got plenty of impressive technical documentation to compensate. I’m sure Jobs would be thrilled to see his ‘it just works’ philosophy replaced with ‘it barely works, but here’s a 50-page PDF explaining why.

What I don't understand is how this happened. What really has changed at Apple in the last decade?

As someone that was around in the days of Apple before bankruptcy, the same, there is no Jobs more around, and is getting back to Gil Amelio kind of Apple.

Tim Cook might be better at squeezing the juice, but he is not a product person.

This time around they need another solution, otherwise regardless of how much money they have, they will stay as the iOS/iPad company, given the relevance of macOS on desktop market worldwide.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#182

Post by wat10000 »

simonw wrote: post #88
wat10000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're using a specific user agent, then you're saying "I want this specific user agent to follow this rule, and not any others." Don't be surprised when a new bot does what you say! If you don't want any bots reading something, use a wildcard.

Sure, but I still think it's OK to look at Apple with a raised eyebrow when they say "and our previously secret training data crawler obeys robots.txt so you can always opt out!"

I've been online since before the web existed, and this is the first time I've ever seen this idea of some implicit obligation to give people advance notice before you deploy a crawler. Looks to me like people are making up new rules on the fly because they don't like Apple and/or LLMs.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#183

Post by thejazzman »

al_borland wrote: post #178
stogot wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is making a point that Apple is behind. They might be publishing research, but it’s completely useless to the end user buying their products.

A plethora of LLMs are available on Apple platforms. If someone wants a chatbot, they can get a chatbot on Apple products. It’s not hard. Are all Android users using Gemini exclusively? Are all Windows users only using Copilot? Where is the native Linux desktop LLM? I really don’t understand this criticism. Would it be nice if Siri could do more, sure. Do I have tolerance for Siri to start hallucinating on simple pro…

Replace "LLMs" with "competitors" and maybe you'll see the point..

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#184

Post by barkerja »

jonplackett wrote: post #64
imoverclocked wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why isn’t my iPhone actually doing any of this yet? What exactly are you referring to? Models do run on iPhone and there are features that take advantage of it, today.

None of those features are in any way interesting though. Image playground is a joke, Siri is a joke, that generative emoji thing is a joke. The AI stuff with photography sure, but that’s more like machine learning. The photo touch up thing is… useable? Sometimes? What is it you’ve been so impressed with?

This is available in iOS 26 to all applications; it's available directly to the user through shortcuts.

I'm currently on the beta, and I have a shortcut that pulls in various bits of context and feeds that directly to the on-device model.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#185

Post by al_borland »

thejazzman wrote: post #183
al_borland wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A plethora of LLMs are available on Apple platforms. If someone wants a chatbot, they can get a chatbot on Apple products. It’s not hard. Are all Android users using Gemini exclusively? Are all Windows users only using Copilot? Where is the native Linux desktop LLM? I really don’t understand this criticism. Would it be nice if Siri could do more, sure. Do I have tolerance for Siri to start hallucinating on simple pro…

Replace "LLMs" with "competitors" and maybe you'll see the point..

The LLMs aren't necessarily competitors. Apple doesn't need to have the best all around LLM. They need to create an AI with excellent integration into their OS and the data the user's store on those systems. Beyond that, they need to have a good system for plugging into whatever other generic LLM a person might want/need. Having something decent out of the box is nice, for basic questions, but being able to easily switch to whatever specialist company is in the lead, or best suited for a user's need, is a lot better than being stuck with one first-party option. Based on how ChatGPT looks in the Apple Settings, I wouldn't be surprised if this is the plan.

Much like with the internet, Apple didn't need to re-invent every website to own it all. From Apple platforms a user can access Amazon, Google, or whatever else. Apple didn't create the internet, they sold a gateway to it. AI could be done largely the same way. This way it doesn't matter who wins, Apple can support it. At the end of the day, an LLM doesn't exist on its own, it needs to be accessed through hardware/software people enjoy using, and not be yet another device to charge and carry. Apple has a very popular phone and the most popular wearable. This positions them very well. They are often late to the party, but tend to be best dressed. The first iPhone didn't even have video, and people clowned them for it, and now iPhone video is largely considered one of the best in the smartphone world.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#186

Post by OldfieldFund »

bigyabai wrote: post #108
ApolloVonZ wrote: post #59

Despite 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.

I think it's a great move that Apple is cautious with including a hardcore LLM in everything. They are not that useful to the regular user.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#187

Post by barbazoo »

astrange wrote: post #150
barbazoo wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An issue for anti-AI people, as seen on Bluesky, is that they're often "insisting you write alt text for all images" people as well. But this is probably the main use for alt text at this point, so they're essentially doing annotation work for free. How did you come to the conclusion that those two groups overlap so significantly?

Well that's easy, I read their posts where they say it.

So you found a couple people expressing this conflicting view and assumed it applies to a larger group? Doesn’t sound very reliable to me but I see this all the time and it makes sense if you look at it as a mechanism to explain the world .

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#188

Post by simonw »

wat10000 wrote: post #182
simonw wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I still think it's OK to look at Apple with a raised eyebrow when they say "and our previously secret training data crawler obeys robots.txt so you can always opt out!"

I've been online since before the web existed, and this is the first time I've ever seen this idea of some implicit obligation to give people advance notice before you deploy a crawler. Looks to me like people are making up new rules on the fly because they don't like Apple and/or LLMs.

I stand by what I said.

Apple are saying you can opt out of their training data collection using robots.txt.

But... they collected their training data before they told people how to opt out.

I don't understand why me pointing that out as "eyebrow raising" is controversial here.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#189

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

simonw wrote: post #188
wat10000 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been online since before the web existed, and this is the first time I've ever seen this idea of some implicit obligation to give people advance notice before you deploy a crawler. Looks to me like people are making up new rules on the fly because they don't like Apple and/or LLMs.

I stand by what I said. Apple are saying you can opt out of their training data collection using robots.txt. But... they collected their training data before they told people how to opt out. I don't understand why me pointing that out as "eyebrow raising" is controversial here.

It's not controversial, it's just not how the ecosystem works. There has never been an expectation that someone make a notification about impending crawling.

It might be nice if there were categories that well-behaved bots could follow, as noted above, but even then the problem exists for bots doing new things that don't fall into existing categories.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#190

Post by hn_go_brrrrr »

al_borland wrote: post #93
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…

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.

"holding it wrong" was exactly the right phrase given how that phrase was used with the iPhone antenna bridging problem. This is an Apple product failing.
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