The iPhone will soon have its own AI, but there will be more than one. Apple is currently working on eight AIs for the iPhone!
Apple is simultaneously working on eight AIs for the iPhone
It was already known that Apple has started developing their own AI on the iPhone. But now it turns out that they are creating as many as eight AIs at the same time. These eight AIs are not super-sized models like ChatGPT, but have a slightly smaller shape.
Large AIs like chatGPT are also called LLMs. This stands for Large Language Models. And they are big: ChatGPT-3 from 2020 consisted of about 175 billion parameters. The parameters are all the training data from which the AI ​​is built. The Small Language Models (SMLs) that Apple is currently working on are a lot smaller and consist of about 270 million to 3 billion parameters.
That is a lot less and that also means that these AIs are somewhat smaller. They are also made to run locally on your iPhone. This has advantages, because it gives you a faster answer and you do not need an internet connection to use the AI.
The small SMLs are trained with less data. In addition, they need a lot less computing power to do their work. That doesn’t make them (much) less smart. The small models are now just as good as the large models from a few years earlier.
So Apple is now working on eight different versions of these small AI models for the iPhone. The company calls them openEMLs, which stands for Open-source Efficient Language Models. Developers can now start working with these AIs.
It will take until the release of iOS 18 before you will even notice anything from the eight AIs on the iPhone. Apple will probably show everyone the first developments during WWDC in June. WWDC 2024 is on Monday, June 10, 7:00 PM (Dutch time). After that, you’ll have to wait a little longer for the release of iOS 18, sometime in September.
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