iOS 18.5—Apple Reveals New Plans To Boost iPhone AI And User Privacy
As Apple prepares to issue iOS 18.4.1, the iPhone maker has confirmed it will launch a new ... More privacy-focused AI training system in iOS 18.5.
As Apple prepares to issue iOS 18.4.1, the iPhone maker has confirmed it will launch a new privacy-focused AI training system in iOS 18.5.
In a blog post first reported by Bloomberg, Apple detailed plans to boost the capabilities of its iPhone AI Apple Intelligence while prioritising user privacy.
The new Apple AI approach could debut in iOS 18.5, which should be out in May, Bloomberg reports.
The move comes as Apple delayed rolling out many of its powerful new Siri capabilities amid criticism of its AI features such as notification summaries.
Part of the reason for this could be Apple's approach to AI privacy, which means it uses synthetic data rather than actual user information to train its models on emails and summarisation capabilities.
This privacy-focused approach to iPhone AI means Apple doesn't always get the best data to train its models, which will of course impact its AI kudos overall.
Taking this into account, the post explains how the iPhone maker is developing new techniques that enable it to 'discover usage trends and aggregated insights to improve features powered by Apple Intelligence,' without revealing individual behavior or unique content to Apple.
To do so, Apple said it will use an approach dubbed differential privacy, which it already uses as part of its opt-in device analytics program for tools such as Genmoji.
To boost AI features such as Writing Tools, Apple will use the same approach, which will first generate synthetic data and then poll opted-in devices with snippets. As part of this, it will ask people to confirm how accurate the snippets are and compare them to its models so it can improve them.
'This synthetic data can then be used to test the quality of our models on more representative data and identify areas of improvement for features like summarisation,' Apple said.
With its new approach, the contents of the sampled emails never leave the device and are never shared with Apple, the iPhone maker added.
'A participating device will send only a signal indicating which of the variants is closest to the sampled data on the device, and Apple learns which selected synthetic emails are most often selected across all devices, not which embedding was selected by any individual device.'
Apple said it will use its differential privacy approach for Image Playground, Image Wand, Memories Creation and Writing Tools in Apple Intelligence, as well as in Visual Intelligence.
With Apple's AI training push coming in iOS 18.5, exciting times are coming — at least for training its AI models to be better while protecting your privacy. This will make its AI better in the future.
For the iPhone maker, it needed to happen. 'Apple are possibly interested in why their AI hasn't taken off like other features have in the past on new models,' says Jake Moore, global cybersecurity advisor at ESET.
So should you opt in to sending this data to Apple in iOS 18.5? It is up to you. The iPhone maker's approach does sound privacy-conscious and it seems those who do opt in don't have any of their individual data collected. However, I always opt out of device analytics features and those who care about their privacy might want to opt out of this one too, just in case.
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