Apple OpenELM Open Source Small AI Models Released, Could Pave the Way for On-Device AI Features on iPhone

Apple has released its new family of artificial intelligence (AI) models called OpenELM. Short for Open Source Efficient Language Models, there are a total of eight AI models with four pre-trained variants and four instruction variants. All of these are small language models (SLMs) that specialize in text-related tasks, highlighting an alignment with the tech giant's reported ambitions to bring AI features to the device this year. Notably, the company is also said to have acquired a French AI startup called Datakalab that works with computer vision models.

OpenELM AI models were spotted on Apple's Hugging Face page. Introducing SLMs, the company said: “We present OpenELM, a family of efficient open-source language models. OpenELM uses a layer-by-layer scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, giving place to improved accuracy There are two variants—pretrained and trained—and include 270 million, 450 million, 1.1 billion, and 3 billion parameters.

Parameters refer to neural networks in an AI model, which basically means knowledge points with each point in the network containing information about a specific topic. The larger the number of parameters, the more efficiently it can understand and answer complex questions. For reference, the recently released Microsoft Phi-3-mini contains 3.8 billion parameters, while Google's Gem contains 2 billion parameters. Pre-trained AI models are designed for general conversations and consistency in responses, while instructional variants adjust to complete tasks.

Small language models may not exhibit a global knowledge base or conversational capability like ChatGPT or Gemini, but they are efficient at handling specific tasks and queries and are generally less prone to errors. While Apple didn't mention any specific use cases for the AI ​​models, it did make the model weights available to the community. The weights are available under the Apple Sample Code License which allows for both research and commercial use.

Apple's move toward SLM development highlights the company's focus on its on-device AI vision, as previously reported. So far, the company has also published papers on three other AI models, including one that focuses on device capabilities, one that includes multimodal capabilities, and one with computer vision that can understand phone screen interfaces intelligent