Apple revealed its largest quarterly decline in iPhone sales since the July-September period in 2020 during the pandemic, placing additional pressure on the tech giant to step up its artificial intelligence efforts. Apple iPhone sales for January-March dropped 10 percent year-over-year, as its top product faced increased competition from Huawei in China, Apple’s third-largest market. Apple’s quarterly revenue decreased 4 percent from the same period last year to $90.8 billion, marking the fifth dip in the past six quarters for the company. Apple’s $23.64 billion profit for the quarter represents a 2 percent reduction from last year. Still, Apple shares rose in after-market trading. Continue reading Apple’s Revenue Is Impacted by Pressure from Chinese Rivals

The trend toward small language models that can efficiently run on a single device instead of requiring cloud connectivity has emerged as a focus for Big Tech companies involved in artificial intelligence. Apple has released the OpenELM family of open-source models as its entry in that field. OpenELM uses “a layer-wise scaling strategy” to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, resulting in what Apple claims is “enhanced accuracy.” The “ELM” stands for “Efficient Language Models,” and one media outlet couches it as “the future of AI on the iPhone.” Continue reading Apple Unveils OpenELM Tech Optimized for Local Applications

Apple has developed a large language model it says has advanced screen-reading and comprehension capabilities. ReALM (Reference Resolution as Language Modeling) is artificial intelligence that can see and read computer screens in context, according to Apple, which says it advances technology essential for a true AI assistant “that aims to allow a user to naturally communicate their requirements to an agent, or to have a conversation with it.” Apple claims that in a benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the smallest ReALM model performed “comparable” to GPT-4, with its “larger models substantially outperforming it.” Continue reading Apple’s ReALM AI Advances the Science of Digital Assistants