I think there’s a larger picture at play here that is being missed.
Getting the weather is a standard feature for years now. Nothing AI about it.
What is “AI” is, Hey Siri, what is the weather at my daughter’s recital coming up?
The AI processing, calculated on-device if what they claim is true, is:
the determination of who your daughter is
What is a recital? An event? Are there any upcoming calendar events that match this concept?
Is the “daughter” associated with this event by description or invitation? Yes? OK, what’s the address?
Submit zip code of recital calendar event involving the kid to the weather API, and churn out a reply that includes all this information…
Well {Your phone contact name}, it looks like it will {remote weather response} during your {calendar eventfrom phone} with {daughter from contacts} on {event date}.
That is the idea between on-device and cloud processing. The phone already has your contacts and calendar and does that work offline rather than educating an online server about your family, events and location, and requests the bare minimum from the internet, in this case nothing more than if you opened the weather app yourself and put in a zip code.
Voice processing is AI and was done by Apple servers. Previously, only the keyword “Hey Siri” was local. Onboard AI chips will allow this to be local. The actual queries will go to the servers. Phones do not have the power to run useful LLM locally- at least not with the near instantaneous response times phone users expect. A 56 Watt 128GB RAM M3 Max does around 8.5 tokens/second.
Perhaps this is why these features will only be available on iPhone 15 Pro/Max and newer? Gotta have those latest and greatest chips.
It will be fun to see how it all shakes out. If the AI can’t run most queries on the phone with all this advertising of local processing…there’ll be one hell of a lawsuit coming up.
EDIT: Finished looking for what I thought I remembered…
Additionally, Siri has been locally processed since iOS 15.
I think there’s a larger picture at play here that is being missed.
Getting the weather is a standard feature for years now. Nothing AI about it.
What is “AI” is,
Hey Siri, what is the weather at my daughter’s recital coming up?The AI processing, calculated on-device if what they claim is true, is:
Well {Your phone contact name}, it looks like it will {remote weather response} during your {calendar event from phone} with {daughter from contacts} on {event date}.That is the idea between on-device and cloud processing. The phone already has your contacts and calendar and does that work offline rather than educating an online server about your family, events and location, and requests the bare minimum from the internet, in this case nothing more than if you opened the weather app yourself and put in a zip code.
Voice processing is AI and was done by Apple servers. Previously, only the keyword “Hey Siri” was local. Onboard AI chips will allow this to be local. The actual queries will go to the servers. Phones do not have the power to run useful LLM locally- at least not with the near instantaneous response times phone users expect. A 56 Watt 128GB RAM M3 Max does around 8.5 tokens/second.
https://www.nonstopdev.com/llm-performance-on-m3-max/
Perhaps this is why these features will only be available on iPhone 15 Pro/Max and newer? Gotta have those latest and greatest chips.
It will be fun to see how it all shakes out. If the AI can’t run most queries on the phone with all this advertising of local processing…there’ll be one hell of a lawsuit coming up.
EDIT: Finished looking for what I thought I remembered…
Additionally, Siri has been locally processed since iOS 15.
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-on-device-siri-iphone-ipad/
I’m not guessing. I linked to the article about the M3 which is much more powerful than the a17 pro in the 15 pro and has the same NPU.