"Apple Teases New AI Language Model Ahead of iOS 18 Release"

Apple, the tech giant known for its sleek and user-friendly products, has finally offered a glimpse into its work on artificial intelligence (AI) language models. After remaining conspicuously absent from the generative AI race, Apple has released OpenELM, a "state-of-the-art open language model" that could potentially hint at the AI capabilities of its upcoming iOS 18 software for iPhones.

Language models are the massive sets of information that tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Dall-E draw on to respond to prompts and generate outputs such as emails, computer code, or images. OpenELM includes everything needed to train and evaluate the language model on publicly available datasets, including training logs, checkpoints, and pretraining configurations. The ELM part of the name stands for "efficient language model."

Apple's release of OpenELM comes just weeks ahead of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) event in early June, where the company traditionally talks about its next wave of software offerings. During a quarterly earnings call in February, CEO Tim Cook hinted that Apple would reveal its plans for generative AI at some point in 2024.

While Apple has been holding fire, most tech giants and a rash of startups have already rushed out one or more generations of gen AI products. Adobe, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI are in a race to release increasingly capable models that not only understand a wider variety of queries but produce more realistic images and videos.

Apple's pretrained and instruction-tuned models have 270 million, 450 million, 1.1 billion, and 3 billion parameters. By way of comparison, ChatGPT 3.5 has 175 billion parameters. The latest version of Meta's Llama 3 model has 70 billion parameters.

While it's not yet clear how OpenELM fits into Apple's plans for generative AI, the release of OpenELM is a significant step for Apple as it seeks to establish itself in the AI language model race. The reproducibility and transparency of large language models are crucial for advancing open research, ensuring the trustworthiness of results and enabling investigations into data and model biases, as well as potential risks.

With Apple's reputation for user-friendly design and seamless integration, the company's entry into the AI language model race could be a game-changer. The release of OpenELM is a promising sign that Apple is gearing up to join the fray, and the tech world eagerly awaits what Apple has in store for its AI offerings.

Source: <https://www.cnet.com/tech/apple-offers-peek-at-its-ai-language-model-as-ios-18-looms/>