Internally, Siri us close to ChatGPT level accuracy.
A new report claims that internally, Apple has already been testing Large Language Models for Siri that are vastly more powerful than the shipping Apple Intelligence, but executives disagree about when to release it.
Backing up AppleInsider‘s position that Apple is not behind on AI, the company has regularly been publishing research showing its progress moving the field forward. Now according to Bloomberg, Apple has already been working with AI systems considerably more power than the on-device Apple Intelligence it has shipped so far.
Specifically, the report says that internally, Apple is using multiple different models with ever greater complexity. Apple is said to be testing models with 3 billion, 7 billion, 33 billion, and 150 billion parameters.
For comparison, Apple in 2024 said that Apple Intelligence’s foundation language models were of the order of 3 billion parameters.
That version of Apple Intelligence is intentionally small in order for it to be possible to run on-device instead of requiring all prompts and requests to be sent to the cloud. The larger versions are cloud-based, and in the case of the 150 billion parameter model, now also said to approach the quality of ChatGPT’s most recent releases.
However, there reportedly remain concerns over AI hallucinations. Apple is said to have held off releasing this Apple Intelligence model in part because of this, implying that the level of hallucinations is too high.
There is said to be another reason for not yet shipping this cloud-based and much improved Siri Chatbot, though. It is claimed that there are philosophical differences between Apple’s senior executives over the release.
It’s conceivable that these differences solely concern each executive’s tolerance for hallucinations in Apple Intelligence. However, there is no further detail.
Previously, it’s been reported that former Siri chief executive chief John Giannandrea is against releasing it yet, others in the executive staff are more keen to launch a Siri Chatbot.
Perhaps because of this internal disagreement, it is now also claimed that there will be fewer Apple Intelligence announcements at WWDC than expected. The whole WWDC keynote is said to be smaller in scope than previous years, but it is still expected to feature a dramatic redesign of the Mac, iPhone, and iPad, to exploit Apple’s user interface lessons learned on the Apple Vision Pro.