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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

#91

Post by dialup_sounds »

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.

Apple is only "behind" if you think they're in the same race. They haven't shown any interest in developing frontier models or taking on the enormous costs of doing so.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#92

Post by totetsu »

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

Apple silicone unified memory is amazing for running things like ollama. You don’t have to wait for them to release their own applications.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#93

Post by al_borland »

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.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#94

Post by alwillis »

martinald wrote: post #62
JKCalhoun wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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/Anthropic via API. But this completely goes against all their private cloud messaging

Using ChatGPT via Siri today, no personally identifying information is shared with OpenAI and those prompts aren't used for training. I suspect Apple would want something similar for Google, Anthropic, etc.

At some point, there will be the inevitable enshitification of AI platforms to recoup the billions VCs have invested, which means ads, which won't happen to Apple users using foundation model-based apps.

> Nearly all their devices do not have enough RAM and

Every Apple Silicon Mac (going back to the M1 in 2020) can run Apple Intelligence. 8 GB RAM is all they need. Every iPhone 15 Pro, Pro Max and the entire 16 line can all run Apple Intelligence.

Flagship iPhone 17 models are expected to come with 12 GB of RAM and all current Mac models come with at least 16 GB.

Apple sells over 200 million iPhones in a given year.

There's no doubt Apple stumbled out of the gate regarding AI; these are early days. They can't be counted out.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#95

Post by brookst »

bitpush wrote: post #27
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…

When Apple inevitably partners with OpenAI or Anthropic, which by their definition isnt doing "ethical crawling", I wonder how I should be reading that.

I mean they also buy from companies with less ethical supply chain practices than their own. I don’t know that I need to feel anything about that beyond recognizing there’s a big difference between exercising good practices and refusing to deal with anyone who does less.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#96

Post by brookst »

bigyabai wrote: post #90
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…

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

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#97

Post by ninkendo »

manoweb wrote: post #75
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…

Your usage of Siri today (probably on an old version of iOS) frankly has nothing to do with the article we are discussing. Sorry to say this but it is going to take time. Comparing the performance of a chatgpt running in a big data center with a model running locally on a phone device... give it a few years.

People have been giving Siri a few years for a decade now. Siri used to run in a data center (and still does for older hardware and things like HomePods) and it has never supported compound queries.

Siri needs to be taken out back and shot. The problem with “upgrading” it is the pull to maintain backwards compatibility for every little thing Siri did, which leads them to try and incorporate existing Siri functionality (and existing Siri engineers) to work alongside any LLM. Which leads to disaster, and none of it works and just made it all slower. They’ve been trying to do an LLM assisted Siri for years now and it’s the most public facing disaster the company has had in a while. Time to start over.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#98

Post by astrange »

simonw wrote: post #89
astrange wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Using our web crawling strategy, we sourced pairs of images with corresponding alt-texts. 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.

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.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#99

Post by floam »

ivape wrote: post #31
floam wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. You can use it directly on iOS 26 beta - without writing a line of code I can toy with the on-device model through Shortcuts on my 16 Pro. It’s not meant to be a general purpose chatbot… but it can work as a general purpose chatbot in airplane mode which is a novel experience. https://share.icloud.com/photos/018AYAPEm06ALXciiJAsLGyuA https://share.icloud.com/photos/0f9IzuYQwmhLIcUIhIuDiudFw The above took li…

What’s the cost of pointing it to Private Cloud Compute? It can’t be free, can it?

It’s “free”, as in it doesn’t charge you anything or require a subscription: it’s a part of Apple Intelligence which is basically something bought with the device. It’s in the cloud so theoretically one shouldn’t need a quite new iPhone or Mac but - one does.

Re: Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025

#100

Post by a_wild_dandan »

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…

Huh? Grammar-based sampling has been commonplace for years. It's a basic feature with guaranteed adherence. There is no "carefully crafting" anything, including safeguards.
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