Apple’s newly released AI models suggest on-device AI features for the iPhone

Apple has released its new family of artificial intelligence (AI) models called OpenELM. Short for open-source efficient language models, there are a total of eight AI models with four pre-trained variants and four instruction variants. These are all small language models (SLMs) that specialize in text-related tasks, highlighting an alignment with the tech giant’s reported ambitions to introduce on-device AI features this year. Notably, the company is also said to have acquired a French AI startup called Datalab that works with computer vision models.

OpenELM AI models were spotted On Apple’s Hugging Face page. Introducing SLM, the company said, “We introduce OpenELM, a family of open-source intelligent language models. OpenELM Transformer uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the model, thereby increasing accuracy. There are two types – pre-trained and instructed – and they come with 270 million, 450 million, 1.1 billion, and 3 billion parameters.

Parameters refer to neural networks in AI models, which essentially means knowledge points with each point in the network containing information about a specific topic. The greater the number of parameters, the more efficiently it can understand and answer complex questions. For reference, the recently released Microsoft Phi-3-mini has 3.8 billion parameters while Google’s Gemma comes with 2 billion parameters. Pre-trained AI models are designed for consistency in common interactions and responses, while instruction variants are fine-tuned to complete the task.

Small language models may not feature a ubiquitous knowledge base or conversational capability like ChatGPT or Gemini, but they are efficient at handling specific tasks and queries and are generally less error-prone. While Apple didn’t mention any specific use cases for the AI ​​models, it did offer weights of models available to the community. The weights are available under Apple’s sample code license that allows its use for both research and commercial purposes.

Apple’s inclination toward developing SLM highlights that the company is focused on its vision of on-device AI, as previously reported. The company has also published papers on three other AI models so far, one focused on on-device capabilities, one that comes with multimodal capabilities, and another with computer vision that can understand smartphone screen interfaces. Is.