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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

#61

Post by dijit »

simonw wrote: post #47
perfmode wrote: post #22

> We believe in training our models using diverse and high-quality data. This includes data that we’ve licensed from publishers, curated from publicly available or open- sourced datasets, and publicly available information crawled by our web-crawler, Applebot. > We do not use our users’ private personal data or user interactions when training our foundation models. Additionally, we take steps to apply filters to remo…

One problem with Apple's approach here is that they were scraping the web for training data long before they published the details of their activities and told people how to exclude them using robots.txt

Uncharitable.

Robots.txt is already the understood mechanism for getting robots to avoid scraping a website.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#62

Post by martinald »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #45
bitpush wrote: post #38

The 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 see it as the opposite. Apple is absolutely positioned to own "chat". I am not worried they'll soon sort things out — and eventually we'll have an LLM integrated into the iPhone; call it Siri or otherwise. With my history encrypted in the cloud, and the trust that Apple has built around privacy ... I think they're going to come out alright.

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 they are still far ahead. OS X, the iPhone and the iPad were all like that. They are still way ahead of the competition on Apple Silicon as well.

I am not very confident on their on device strategy at least in the short to medium term. Nearly all their devices do not have enough RAM and even if they did SLMs are very far behind what users "know" as AI - even the free ChatGPT plan is leap years ahead of the best 3B param on device model. Maybe there will be huge efficiency gains.

Private cloud is used AFIAK for virtually 0 use cases so far. Perhaps it will be more interesting longer term but not very useful at the moment given the lack of a suitable (ie: non Chinese), large (>500b param) model. They would also struggle to scale it if they roll it out to billions of iOS devices especially if they put features that use a lot of tokens.

Then they've got OpenAI/Gemini/Anthropic via API. But this completely goes against all their private cloud messaging and gives those providers enormous potential control over Apple, which is not a position Apple usually finds itself in. It will also be extremely expensive to pay someone per token for OS level features for billions of iOS/Mac devices and unless they can recoup this via some sort of subscription will hit services margins badly.

To me its clear the future of "OS" is going to involve a lot of agentic tool calling. These require good models, with large context windows and a lot of tokens - this will definitely not work on device. Indeed this is exactly what the Siri vapourware demo was.

I'm sure they can potentially get to a great UX (though these missteps are making me question this). But having such a core feature outsourced does not leave them in a good position.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#63

Post by alwillis »

visarga wrote: post #54
bitpush wrote: post #38

The 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.

The paper was a very nice read, and they did many creative things. It's a pity this model won't be directly accessible, only integrated in some apps.

> It's a pity this model won't be directly accessible, only integrated in some apps.

It's already accessible using Shortcuts, even to non-developers "iOS 26 Shortcuts + Apple Intelligence is POWERFUL " (Youtube) [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/Msde-lZwOxg?si=KJqTgtWjpdNDxneh

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#64

Post by jonplackett »

imoverclocked wrote: post #20
jonplackett wrote: post #16

Every time I see a paper from Apple I just feel like, OK so why isn’t my iPhone actually doing any of this yet? Why give this to developers if you haven’t been able to get Siri to use it yet? Does it not work or something? I guess we’ll find out when devs start trying to make stuff

> 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?

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#65

Post by GeekyBear »

Uehreka wrote: post #52
outworlder wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you think they _must_ compete with large models on the internet.

I wouldn’t go as far as GP, but yes, absolutely, they must compete with large models on the internet. Customers are now used to being able to ask a computer a question and get something better than “I just ran a web search for what you said, here are the uncurated, unsummarized results”. Yes, this is in fact what people want. Apple is the biggest company in the world (don’t quibble this y’all, you know what I mean) a…

> I wouldn’t go as far as GP, but yes, absolutely, they must compete with large models on the internet

The people running large models want to charge a monthly fee for that.

I'm fine with having a free model that runs on device without slurping up my data.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#66

Post by jonplackett »

geoffpado wrote: post #25
jonplackett wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It says there’s 2 models - one local. It’s already released to app developers to use locally I think (it was in the keynote for WWDC).

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…

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#67

Post by simonw »

dijit wrote: post #61
simonw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One problem with Apple's approach here is that they were scraping the web for training data long before they published the details of their activities and told people how to exclude them using robots.txt

Uncharitable. Robots.txt is already the understood mechanism for getting robots to avoid scraping a website.

People often use specific user agents in there, which is hard if you don't know what the user agents are in advance!

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#68

Post by 0x457 »

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…

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.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#69

Post by wat10000 »

simonw wrote: post #67
dijit wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncharitable. Robots.txt is already the understood mechanism for getting robots to avoid scraping a website.

People often use specific user agents in there, which is hard if you don't know what the user agents are in advance!

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.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#70

Post by woah »

Daedren wrote: post #29
frankfrank13 wrote: post #26

AFAICT this is the first commercial model trying to be marketed as responsibly-sourced. Love it, but it also seems like the noise around this issue has died down. Is this for legal cover? Or more apple-privacy marketing

Stockholders are suing them over Apple Intelligence. Definitely legal cover.

"Sorry we are hilariously far behind everyone else in the industry after having made a huge amount of fanfare about 'Apple Intelligence' for years. It's just that we have shot ourselves in the knee to satisfy Bluesky posters and the NY Time's lawyers"
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