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Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025
- leot 1y agoThe dozens of "contributors" being presented in random order is, one would suppose, an anti-poaching tactic?
- zamadatix 1y agoIt's hard to know what it isn't for certain but there are many other reasons papers list contributors in a flat structure (be it random or alphabetical order). Particularly with large numbers of collaborators.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago"References" section sort of narrows the field anyway.
- rafram 1y agoNot very hard to look people up on LinkedIn and figure out who the core researchers are. I think this is just a very surface-level overview paper that encompasses a bunch of different research projects conducted by different teams, and it would be difficult to order the contributors in any meaningful way.
- browningstreet 1y agoAs someone whose last name is near the end of the alphabet, that's not the first presumption I had seeing that page.
- ml-anon 1y agoWell meta already got Ruoming so he can obviously give them a ranked list of who to grab. Most of his team are former Google brain so GDM knows who is good.
- 44520297 1y agoConsidering a large portion of the contributors have names originating in a script and language that has no relationship whatsoever to English’s already arbitrary letter ordering, this list configuration is as good as any.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI wonder if we'll see these models running on the phone (aiPhone) hardware in the future.
- kingnothing 1y ago> The new Foundation Models framework gives access to developers to start creating their own reliable, production-quality generative AI features with the approximately 3B parameter on-device language model. The ∼3B language foundation model at the core of Apple Intelligence excels at a diverse range of text tasks like summarization, entity extraction, text understanding, refinement, short dialog, generating creative content, and more. While we have specialized our on-device model for these tasks, it is not designed to be a chatbot for general world knowledge. We encourage app developers to use this framework to design helpful features tailored to their apps
- Zee2 1y ago> a ∼3B-parameter on-device model
- ThomasBb 1y agoThere are even already some local AFM to Open AI API bridge project on GitHub - that lets you point basically any Open AI compatible client at the local models. Super nice for basic summarisation and completions.
- JKCalhoun 1y agoI was worried "device" was a Mac mini, not an iPhone. (I already have been running models on my MacBook Pro.)
- floam 1y agoIt 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/018AYAPEm06ALXciiJAsLGyuA https://share.icloud.com/photos/0f9IzuYQwmhLIcUIhIuDiudFw 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.
- jonplackett 1y agoEvery 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
- bayindirh 1y ago> why isn’t my iPhone actually doing any of this yet? 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.
- jonplackett 1y agoIt 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).
- geoffpado 1y agoThe 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.
- jonplackett 1y agoThat’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…
- geoffpado 1y agoMy suspicion with playing with it in the developer betas is that, yes, this is what it’s capable of.
- perfmode 1y ago> 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 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.
- bitpush 1y agoWhen Apple inevitably partners with OpenAI or Anthropic, which by their definition isnt doing "ethical crawling", I wonder how I should be reading that.
- jhickok 1y agoThey already partnered with OpenAI, right?
- DSingularity 1y agoTo use their APIs at a discount, so what?
- JimDabell 1y agoApple aren’t paying OpenAI anything: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-12/apple-to-pay-openai-for-chatgpt-through-distribution-not-cash https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-06-12/apple-to-...
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- JacobJack 1y agoI'd really like to be able to use this 3B model on my little 4GB GPU card! It looks very capable for a reasonable weight. Maybe one day on HhuggingFace
- frankfrank13 1y agoAFAICT 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
- Daedren 1y agoStockholders are suing them over Apple Intelligence. Definitely legal cover.
- woah 1y ago"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"
- msgodel 1y agoDo people have an issue with the smollm datasets? I guess it isn't really commercial.
- jiehong 1y agoLooks nice. I just wish they’d improve the models behind dictation on both iPhone and Mac to have better accuracy and on the fly multiple language transcription.
- poszlem 1y agoIn the meantime, when I ask Siri to set a timer for 15 minutes, about 10–15% of the time it just says, “Here’s what I found about setting a timer for 15 minutes,” instead of actually setting the timer"
- mittermayr 1y agoAll 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-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.
- losvedir 1y ago> What is 75 degrees fahrenheit in celsius, and what is 85 degrees in fahrenheit Err, what? As a native English speaker human that's a pretty confusing question to me, too!
- hu3 1y agoFirst, most of the English speaking world is not native. "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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world
- manoweb 1y agoI am not sure why you go on the subject of English speaking world etc. Anyway, the models you tested with that query, which I am not sure why we think is a good benchmark, are local models running on a wireless device or they use datacenter and only convey the text back and forth?
- lxgr 1y agoI'm fairly sure Siri still sends user voice samples to a data center. At least for a while, it used to use multipath TCP to decrease latency over multiple available network connections if I'm not misremembering. Some modern Apple devices support "local Siri", but it's a limited subset of both voice recognition performance and capabilities.
- sneilan1 1y agoI feel like this is the most exciting news today about AI on hn. I really hope apple shows that small models can be just as capable as the bigger ones. Maybe they have the people on perplexity working on these small models.
- bitpush 1y agoThe 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.
- outworlder 1y agoOnly if you think they _must_ compete with large models on the internet.
- Uehreka 1y agoI 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) 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.
- GeekyBear 1y ago> 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.
- const_cast 1y agoThis usecase is run of the mill for someone like Google, who used to store and show you your location forever, but it's not in Apple style. It's hard to be like "uhhh privacy" when you send all requests to a remote server where they're stored in clear text for god knows how long. As of right now, there is no way to run big LLMs in a privacy preserving manner. It just doesn't exist. You can't E2EE encrypt these services, because the compute is done on the server, so it has to decrypt it. There are some services which will randomize your instance and things like that, but that kind of defeats the a big part of what makes LLMs useful, context. Until we can run these models locally, there's no way to get around the privacy nightmare aspects of it.
- chevman 1y agoSiri is literally a joke! 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!
- EGreg 1y agoHere is my question… 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.
- wmf 1y agoThe model is gigabytes so I doubt they will push updates frequently.
- robotresearcher 1y agoEducate me: is there any work on modifying models in a way that changes relatively few parameters, so an update is a smaller payload?
- wmf 1y agoYeah, LoRAs. Apple uses them to specialize a single model for different uses.
- robotresearcher 1y agoThanks! Very interesting. Lead inventor Edward Hu describes them, and their usage, incredibly well in this video: https://youtu.be/DhRoTONcyZE?si=vM2N5zNslbQ5z8gv https://youtu.be/DhRoTONcyZE?si=vM2N5zNslbQ5z8gv
- alwillis 1y ago> The question is… will Apple be constantly tweaking these models, or only during OS upgrades? Certainly when new updates are released--going from macOS 26 to 26.1). They can probably push model updates between releases if necessary.
- ApolloVonZ 1y agoDespite 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 where you might get back a well formatted JSON after a carefully crafted request, but still you never can’t be sure and need to implement a bunch of safeguards. Obviously it’s still the beginning and other tools might do something similar. But as an iOS developer that makes the usage of AI so much simpler. Especially with the bridge to external AIs that still allows you to map back to the type safe structured Swift models. I try not to be a hater, every progress, even slow or underwhelming at first might lead to improvements everywhere else.
- 0x457 1y agoGuided generation is called "Structured Output" by other providers? Well partially generated content streaming thing is great and I haven't seen it anywhere else.
- ApolloVonZ 1y agoSorry if I didn’t use the correct terms. Didn’t catch up on all the terminology coming from my native language. ;) But yes, I agree, the fact that parts, different parameters, of the model can be completed asynchronous by streaming the output of the model, is quite unique. Apple/swift was late with async/await, but putting it all together, it probably plays well with the ‘never’ (I know ) asynchronous and reactive coding.
- astrange 1y agoAn issue with this is that model quality can get a lot lower when you force it into a structured form, because it's out of distribution for the model. (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.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoApple can’t afford to run models, there are too many iPhones and not enough data centers. Running on device is also risky because cycle limitations will make it seem dumb in comparison.
- yalogin 1y agoI know apple is methodical and don’t show their hand but I cannot help but feel they are releasing all this research because they haven’t integrated any into the phone or provided a compelling AI functionality for their users. This is their only way to say “hey we are good with AI too”.
- LeicaLatte 1y agoThis 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.
- ipnon 1y agoWhat I don't understand is how this happened. What really has changed at Apple in the last decade?
- e1ghtSpace 1y agoI think that iOS 7 theme update caused their brains to rot.
- pjmlp 1y agoAs 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.
- eviks 1y agoThe philosophy is the same, and since it was never implemented in the mythical era of Jobs, so is the practice. So he'd be as thrilled as he was back then?
- devinprater 1y agoLol and yet, Google has AI image descriptions in their screen reader, TalkBack, before Apple. Apple is supposed to be the accessibility king. But with AI, they just can't, even if they obviously have access to ChatGPT which has vision capabilities. Granted, I don't know what model Google uses because tech news don't do Android Accessibility Suite APK teardowns, but it works pretty well, and fast too.
- kalleboo 1y agoHasn't Apple had AI image descriptions in VoiceOver for 5 years now? https://www.idropnews.com/ios-14/ios-14-adds-ai-based-voiceover-descriptions-for-images-heres-how-to-use-it/144589/ https://www.idropnews.com/ios-14/ios-14-adds-ai-based-voiceo...