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Report: Apple Plans to Make On-Device AI a Key WWDC Focus

Yr Blues said:
Does Apple care about the environment and humanity?
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I would like to believe that they do and probably more so than other large high tech entities, yet the AI wave is catching up with them and it might start biting them financially. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have already pushed it quite far for both the environment and humanity, so currently Apple are just trailing behind.
 
JMalone said:
Private yes, but if you’re mature enough to understand scale then you’ll understand datacenters are more efficient and cheaper than millions of devices trying to do the same thing. They can invest in renewable energy, or buy energy at fixed rates for many months and they can bulk purchase hardware components at discount every three years.
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The “efficiency and scale” comes at the expense of communities across the US. Sucking up their water, promising more jobs on paper than needed IRL, and adding noise pollution.

And its also a vehicle for surveillance. You should be in control of your AI, not Scam Altman and his fed cronies.

I know this is an unpopular opinion that few understand, but it is indeed where things are going. Private, decentralized, local AI is the future.
 
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one more said:
I would like to believe that they do and probably more so than other large high tech entities, yet the AI wave is catching up with them and it might start biting them financially. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have already pushed it quite far for both the environment and humanity, so currently Apple are just trailing behind.
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The blind leading the blind.
 
FatLouie said:
My concern is RAM and Battery.

What AI can do 'on device' will be limited unless there is a huge swath of memory available. How useful this will be without access to cloud services is questionable to me. I suspect this feature will be using the cloud more than Apple is acknowledging at the moment.
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Exactly this. I think Apple needs to do a miracle if they want to run on device AI on the iPhones with 8 GB RAM. Probably most of the workloads will be on the cloud, like right now.
 
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citysnaps said:
That said... I expect most people here will announce (multiple times over the next few months) they'll quickly turn it off as soon as it comes out, as has happened in the past.
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you see, until "AI" or "Apple Intelligence" can give me something that makes my life easier, and I mean something for me personally, not biz related (I'm retired), I will keep "Apple Intelligence" off. photo manipulation, Genmoji, chatbots and such I don't need, they do not add value to me ... YMMV.

Having said that, I will see what will be coming and decide at that point to try it out
 
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crsh1976 said:
Aside from comforting shareholders that Apple isn't completely missing the AI boat, I'm not sure who this is suppose to reassure.
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Not sure if it’s meant to calm the shareholders or what, but I can say this: back when the iPhone 16 launched, all those forum folks who swore Apple wasn’t overpromising, the ads weren’t misleading, and Apple Intelligence was just gonna be “a little late” but totally useful as promised - and if you didn’t like it, just return the phone already - can finally relax now, I guess...right around the time the iPhone 18 comes out.
 
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madmin said:
I was taught to use it or lose it
so I prefer using my internal BI*
it's freely available to humans

*brain intelligence
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Same here. That is why when I have to make any mathematical calculation, no matter how complex, I eschew a calculator.
 
DelayedGratificationGene said:
Everything I read says On Device or Edge AI will be the future of AI with Cloud AI still being used but to a lesser and lesser extent. A big analogy I keep seeing is the mainframe to the PC. I guess Apple was right all along.
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I attended a conference last year in London where a very senior chief from Arm said exactly this. It was their position that most of the value, from both user and vendor perspective, was in AI at the edge. From the user's point of view it would mean rapid, secure and private processing that is available offline. From the vendor perspective it's a solution that's more easy to monetise in tiny increments which, at scale, stack up to good profitability. And that's where Arm hardware focus will be: facilities to securely deliver model or weights - essentially the valuable IP - to a hardware device at the edge and to allow it to run there.
 
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I will be dismayed if Apple makes it an "all or nothing" with AI like "Apple Intelligence" is right now. Currently, if you don't want certain features of "Apple Intelligence" you need to turn it ALL off. But that's probably their goal, shoving it down our throats....
 
This is how innovation is supposed to work. If companies all concentrated on making efficiencies in on-device AI instead of building out RAM-sucking data centres that nobody is paying for the market would be in a better place.
 
neuropsychguy said:
It’s only 'vaporware' if you think "AI" is just a chatbot. Apple has been shipping dedicated "AI" hardware since the A11 chip in 2017. The Neural Engine inside an iPhone runs massive machine learning pipelines completely in the background. It handles on-device Live Text OCR, face and object recognition in your photo library, deciding when to charge and how much to charge batteries, computational photography processing at a fraction of the power a CPU would use, and much more. Apple Intelligence does have live features too (albeit in a much more limited and delayed state than originally announced); those same local cores are handling generative text editing and image manipulation. It’s hard to call something vaporware when it has been running on iPhones for years.

Edit: I'm not defending Apple Intelligence or its rollout. I'm simply clarifying that Apple has been running "AI" on our iPhones and Macs for a long time. Focusing only on one particular type of "AI" is not acknowledging the forest because there are some trees missing.

2nd edit: as an example, FaceID is "AI" as well. It's a convolutional neural network (CNN). Even TouchID uses machine learning ("AI"), and that's been around for years.
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I just want to clarify one small thing: chatbot AI isn’t easy at all. If anything, it’s probably one of the hardest forms of AI.
Just as a comparison, Siri hasn’t really been able to hold a proper sentence for a long, long, long time.
Also, if we’re talking about AI in the broadest sense, then yeah, developers have been using it for ages. Even game engines have it. Anyone who knows game dev or frameworks knows that inside those systems, “that thing” is literally called AI. In a lot of cases, behavior prediction and user analysis also involve AI theory and implementation.
So I’m pretty sure the gentlemen here are fully capable of telling the difference. I’m not really trying to argue against your point - I just wanted to say one thing about so-called “chatbot” AI.
 
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FatLouie said:
My concern is RAM and Battery.

What AI can do 'on device' will be limited unless there is a huge swath of memory available. How useful this will be without access to cloud services is questionable to me. I suspect this feature will be using the cloud more than Apple is acknowledging at the moment.
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It is my concern as well.

If the models are well trained with fine tuned skills the increased efficiency will reduce the load.
 
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ddhhddhh2 said:
Not sure if it’s meant to calm the shareholders or what, but I can say this: back when the iPhone 16 launched, all those forum folks who swore Apple wasn’t overpromising, the ads weren’t misleading, and Apple Intelligence was just gonna be “a little late” but totally useful as promised - and if you didn’t like it, just return the phone already - can finally relax now, I guess...right around the time the iPhone 18 comes out.
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It doesn't help that it feels like it's an obligation on their end rather than something that answers customers' needs. Oh well, it's just another AI trope.
 
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Apple Music can do with some AI when doing playlists. Spotify's DJ is so much better than what Apple Music can do at the moment. Spotify helped me discover new bands I had never heard of before whilst Apple music kept giving me the same songs in the same order day after day week after week.
Helping me discover new music is a good use of AI.
 
neuropsychguy said:
It’s only 'vaporware' if you think "AI" is just a chatbot. Apple has been shipping dedicated "AI" hardware since the A11 chip in 2017. The Neural Engine inside an iPhone runs massive machine learning pipelines completely in the background. It handles on-device Live Text OCR, face and object recognition in your photo library, deciding when to charge and how much to charge batteries, computational photography processing at a fraction of the power a CPU would use, and much more. Apple Intelligence does have live features too (albeit in a much more limited and delayed state than originally announced); those same local cores are handling generative text editing and image manipulation. It’s hard to call something vaporware when it has been running on iPhones for years.

Edit: I'm not defending Apple Intelligence or its rollout. I'm simply clarifying that Apple has been running "AI" on our iPhones and Macs for a long time. Focusing only on one particular type of "AI" is not acknowledging the forest because there are some trees missing.

2nd edit: as an example, FaceID is "AI" as well. It's a convolutional neural network (CNN). Even TouchID uses machine learning ("AI"), and that's been around for years.
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That's nice and all, but Mom's still stuck at the airport...
 
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Always available, always private is a good feature. Also, that is free. Intelligence would not be comparable to frontier, but if Siri can call to their smarter colleague in cloud, that might solve some of it.

Pivotal question: How smart real time voice model one can actually host on a phone? If we can distillate GPT-4o level model there, this might be ok enough strategy. But that is a big if.

Trouble is that smartest models are multimodal and real time. One cannot match that experience by having a dumber model that needs to say "I do not know about that, just a bit, I'll call my colleague to check if he knows".
 
JMalone said:
Whenever we see someone frothing at the mouth about evil AI and how they wish it doesn’t exist, we catch them the next day asking ChatGPT what’s the difference between a diplosaurus and a brontosaurus and please ChatGPT rewrite this long angry anti AI post I want to publish on the internets.
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I can’t speak for other people but I have never sent ChatGPT a single prompt or inquiry. The only AI I have used is Google’s automatic AI responses they added to their search function.

I have never used AI to write a single thing or idea I have put out into the world.

I have never asked AI to edit anything I’ve put out into the world aside from extremely basic autocorrect such as “vlight” to “blight”.

AI has its uses in researching things (but it also hallucinates so if you know nothing about the topic it is still very dangerous) and I’m not completely anti-AI. But, I don’t care about this stuff, and I get that some people are eating it up.
 
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