Apple’s new AI model hints at how AI could come to the iPhone

Apple has been quiet about its plans for generative AI, but with the release of new AI models today, it appears the company’s immediate ambitions lie firmly in the “make AI run locally on Apple devices” realm.

Researchers from Apple released OpenELM, a series of four very small language models on the Hugging Face model library, on Wednesday. Apple said on its Hugging Face model page that OpenELM, which stands for “Open-source Efficient Language Models,” performs very efficiently on text-related tasks like email writing. The models are open source and ready for developers to use.

OpenELM is even smaller than most lightweight AI models

Apple CEO Tim Cook teased that generative AI features will be coming to the company’s devices, saying in February that Apple is spending “a tremendous amount of time and effort” in the space. However, Apple has yet to share specifics on what its use of AI might look like.

The company has released other AI models before, though it hasn’t released any AI foundation model for commercial use like its competitors have.