> 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 remove certain categories of personally identifiable information and to exclude profanity and unsafe material.
> Further, we continue to follow best practices for ethical web crawling, including following widely-adopted robots.txt protocols to allow web publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Apple’s generative foundation models. Web publishers have fine-grained controls over which pages Applebot can see and how they are used while still appearing in search results within Siri and Spotlight.
Respect.
- Famous Dead Person
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.
And then they just... gave up?
I don't know what happened to them. When AI breakthrough happened, I expected them to put up a fight. They never did.
Robots.txt is already the understood mechanism for getting robots to avoid scraping a website.
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?
> this is probably the main use for alt text at this point
> Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government "prohibited" the company "from sharing any information,"
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-dollar devices that literally connect us to the world and contain our entire life data. It's what I would've expected from one of the most valuable companies in the world.
(Well, with multiple direct objects, anyway.)
Err, what? As a native English speaker human that's a pretty confusing question to me, too!
"As of 2022, there were about 400 million native speakers of English. Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion."
Second, all popular models I tested did well with that query, including Gemini on Android (aka "ok Google"), except Apple's.
Probably wouldn't have made a difference but the second half of that statement isn't exactly clear. 85 degrees what?
I also think when you're chaining these two separate calculations together you get a problem when it comes to displaying the results.
So yeah, Apple is way behind on this stuff.
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.
Yes, but isn't that infuriating? The technology exits! It even exists, as evidenced by this article, in the same company that provides Siri!
At least I feel that way every time I interact with it – or for that matter my Google Home speaker, ironically made and operated by the company that invented transformer networks.
By the time Apple has an AI-native product ready, people will already associate it with dehumanization and fascism.
Well partially generated content streaming thing is great and I haven't seen it anywhere else.
(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.
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
What exactly are you referring to? Models do run on iPhone and there are features that take advantage of it, today.
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?
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?
Probably Apple is trying to distill the models so they can run on your phone locally. Remember, most, if not all, of Siri is running on your device. There's no round trip whatsoever for voice processing.
Also, for larger models, there will be throwaway VMs per request, so building that infra takes time.
That said, "Private Cloud Compute" does run on proprietary Apple hardware, so availability might be a concern (assuming they don't want to start charging for it).
My son (he's 11 years old now and fairly skilled with all the main AI tools, eg chatgpt, gemini, etc) and I retry her every month or so, and this past time we just laughed. Can't handle basic questions - hears the question wrong, starts, stops, takes us to some random ass webpage, etc, etc.
"She's so jacked up!" he said.
Apple needs to get this under control and figured out, stat!
Running on device is also risky because cycle limitations will make it seem dumb in comparison.
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.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/018AYAPEm06ALXciiJAsLGyuA
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0f9IzuYQwmhLIcUIhIuDiudFw
The above took like 3 seconds to generate. That little box that says On-device can be flipped between On-device, Private Cloud Compute, and ChatGPT.
Their LLM uses the ANE sipping battery and leaves the GPU available.
There's a WWDC video "Meet the Foundation Models Framework" [1].
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.
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
They love to "invent" brands that they control, so that they can commodotize the underlying supplier. Hey user, it is a retina display and dont worry whether it is LG or Samsung is making it.
Apple tried this with AI, calling it "Apple Intelligence". Unfortunately that faltered. Now Apple will have to come out and say "iPhone with ChatGPT" or "Siri with Claude". AND APPLE HATES THAT. HATES IT WITH PASSION.
People will start to associate smartness with ChatGPT or Claude, and Apple loses control and OpenAI/Anthropic's leverage goes up.
Apple has painted themselves into a corner. And as I said elsewhere, it is a train-wreck happening in slowmotion.
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) and should be able to deliver this experience. And sure, if they could do it on device that would be aces, but that’s not an item on the menu, and customers seem fine with web-based things like ChatGPT for now. To act like Apple is doing anything other than fumbling right now is cope.
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.
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.
They were touting the same features that other companies are now delivering. Point the phone at something, and it'll tell you what you're looking at. Or summarize news articles etc. Instead we got .. emojithingy
What is this train-wreck you are hallucinating?
It's already accessible using Shortcuts, even to non-developers "iOS 26 Shortcuts + Apple Intelligence is POWERFUL " (Youtube) [1].
Most of his team are former Google brain so GDM knows who is good.
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 more profits from their collective users.
Certainly when new updates are released--going from macOS 26 to 26.1).
They can probably push model updates between releases if necessary.
> “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.