Apple's new AI models could power on-device features on iOS 18 for iPhones

Apple has released "Open-source Efficient Language Models" (OpenELM), which are a series of four small language models capable of tasks such as text generation, text summarisation, and more

Apple is gearing up to introduce generative artificial intelligence features at its worldwide developers conference on June 10. Ahead of the developers-focused event, the technology giant has released small language models that could power the on-device AI features on iOS 18 for iPhones.

Researchers at Apple have released new OpenELM AI-models on the Hugging Face model library. OpenELM, which stands for “Open-source Efficient Language Models" is a series of four small language models that are capable of running on devices such as Phones and PCs.

These new AI-models can take up text-related tasks such as text generation, summary writing, email writing, and more. The model is open source and available on the Hugging Face library for developers to use.

The small language models within OpenELM come in four sizes, with 270 million parameters, 450 million parameters, 1.1 billion parameters, and the largest with 3 billion parameters. These parameters refer to the number of variables an AI-model can understand from its training data for decision making.

For comparison, Microsoft’s recently released Phi-3 model can go up to 3.8 billion parameters. Similarly, Google’s open model Gemma, which was launched earlier this year, offers up to 2 billion parameters.

Earlier this week, Bloomberg reported that Apple is developing its own large language model (LLM) to power on-device generative AI features on its upcoming iPhone series. According to the report, Apple’s AI model will run entirely on-device, without necessitating internet connectivity.

With the release of small scaled AI models, capable of running on-device, Apple could likely use them to power its native features on the iPhones. Since models with smaller parameters as Apple’s OpenELM are less powerful than LLMs, the company could team up with Google or Microsoft-backed OpenAI to bring cloud-based powerful AI tools too.