Apple has lagged behind in AI, but now it’s using user data to improve its models while « protecting privacy. »
According to a new report by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is quietly shifting gears on its AI game, and it hopes to do it in a way that stays true to its privacy-first philosophy. The company now plans to analyze user data directly on devices to sharpen its AI models without ever sending that data back to its servers.
So what does that mean in plain English? Well, instead of relying mostly on synthetic data (which is basically fake but realistic-looking text created by Apple), the company is going to start checking that synthetic data against snippets of real-world items like recent emails stored right on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Apple explained it like this:
When creating synthetic data, our goal 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.
