Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models Tech Report 2025 (machinelearning.apple.com)

The dozens of "contributors" being presented in random order is, one would suppose, an anti-poaching tactic?

I wonder if we'll see these models running on the phone (aiPhone) hardware in the future.

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

> 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.

I'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

AFAICT 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

Looks 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.

In 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"

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-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.

I 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.

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.

Siri 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!

Here 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.

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 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.

Apple 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.

I 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”.

This 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.

Lol 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.