New Training Methods to Save Apple Intelligence?

Apple is introducing new methods to train and improve the performance of its Apple Intelligence features, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. 

The Cupertino giant employs synthetic data to enhance Apple Intelligence’s features that handle long text chunks for summarisation or writing. It says the process will be improved further. For example, in the case of emails, it begins with Apple generating artificial mails that mimic real ones but contain no user information. Then, to make this data useful, user devices provide feedback privately. 

Each device compares these artificial examples to the user’s genuine emails locally and anonymously, indicating which types of artificial emails are the closest match. Apple utilises this collective feedback from many users to enhance its synthetic training data, improving the AI without ever accessing anyone’s personal email content.

“We will soon begin using synthetic data with users who opt into device analytics to improve email summaries,” said Apple. 

Source: Apple

Apple stated it will apply the same privacy-preserving techniques used for enhancing Genmoji to improve features such as Image Playground, Image Wand, Memories Creation, and Writing Tools within Apple Intelligence and Visual Intelligence.

To enhance its Genmoji feature, Apple analyses popular prompts from users who opt to share analytics. “For example, understanding how our models perform when a user requests Genmoji that contain multiple entities (like “dinosaur in a cowboy hat”) helps us improve the responses to those kinds of requests,” said Apple. 

This process employs privacy-preserving techniques, ensuring that individual data remains confidential, devices are untraceable, and rare prompts stay undisclosed. “These techniques allow Apple to understand overall trends, without learning information about any individual, like what prompts they use or the content of their emails,” said the company. 

Apple Intelligence is in dire need of improvement, especially in terms of generating accurate summaries. Last year, Apple came under fire for inaccurate AI-generated summaries of news articles, particularly from BBC News. 

Moreover, there is an entire subreddit called r/AppleIntelligenceFail, where users share some of the most confusing and out-of-context results derived from Apple Intelligence. 

Recently, Bloomberg reported that Mike Rockwell, the Apple Vision Pro creator, will replace John Giannandrea as the AI head. As per the reports, CEO Tim Cook had “lost confidence” in Giannandrea’s ability to develop products. 

Furthermore, Apple also announced that the release of a more personalised version of Siri had been delayed until 2026. Last month, it was reported that the company was struggling to mitigate various bugs and engineering problems within Siri.