Apple will analyze your on-device emails to improve AI features
What's the story
Apple is gearing up to improve its artificial intelligence (AI) platform by analyzing data on customers' devices.
The move comes as a way to enhance Apple's AI capabilities without sacrificing user privacy.
The company has long been using synthetic data to train its AI models, a technique that sometimes doesn't reflect real customer data, affecting the performance of its AI systems.
Scenario
Apple will compare its synthetic data with on-device information
Apple's new method aims to keep user data on their devices and not use it directly to train AI models.
The tech giant will generate synthetic data and compare it to a recent sample of user emails within the Mail app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
By matching this fake data against real emails, Apple can identify which parts of the synthetic dataset most closely resemble actual user messages.
Innovative strategy
New approach to AI training
Apple says its new approach helps enhance text-related capabilities in its Apple Intelligence platform, including notifications summaries, Writing Tools' thought synthesis capability, and message recaps.
The goal, as the company said on its machine learning blog, is "to produce synthetic sentences or emails that are similar enough in topic or style to the real thing to help improve our models for summarization, but without Apple collecting emails from the device."
AI development
Apple Intelligence powered by large language models
Large language models, the backbone of contemporary AI technology, power features in Apple Intelligence.
Apart from synthetic data, Apple has also used third-party licensed information and data from public internet scans for training its models.
However, this reliance on synthetic data has led to occasional inaccuracies in notifications and text summaries.
The new system could potentially enhance Apple's models as it strives to compete with other major players in the AI sector.
System launch
Rollout of new system and privacy-focused improvements
The new system will debut in the next beta version of iOS and iPadOS 18.5, and macOS 15.5.
Apple also plans to introduce privacy-focused improvements to the models powering other Apple Intelligence features, such as Image Playground, Image Wand, Memories Creation, and Visual Intelligence.
The company has already begun leveraging differential privacy technology to enhance its Genmoji feature, which lets users create custom emojis, without compromising user data.
Team restructuring
Apple's AI team undergoes management changes
In recent months, Apple's AI team has been in turmoil, with reports detailing leadership issues, product delays, and executive changes.
Apple restructured its AI group's management in March, transferring responsibility for Siri from executive John Giannandrea to Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell and software chief Craig Federighi.
The company plans to announce upgrades for Apple Intelligence in June but won't implement much-anticipated features for Siri until next year.