Comment on Apple is reportedly exploring a partnership with Google for Gemini-powered feature on iPhones
AliasAKA@lemmy.world 3 months ago
This is a really bad look. It will probably be the case that it will be an opt in feature, and maybe Apple negotiates that Google gives them a model they house on premises and don’t send any data back on, but it’s getting very hard for Apple here to claim privacy and protection (and not that they do a particularly good job of that unless you stop all their telemetry).
If an LLM is gonna be on a phone, it needs to be local. Local is really hard because the models are huge (even with quantization and other tricks). So this seems incredibly unlikely. Then it’s just “who do you trust to sell your data for ads more, Apple or Google?” To which I say neither, and pray Linux phones take off (yes yes I know root an Android and de google it but still).
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I don’t see how it’s any different to using Safari as the default search.
Also - phones don’t have terabytes of RAM. The idea that a (good) LLM can run on a phone is ridiculous. Yes, you can run small AI models on there - but they’re not very good models.
AliasAKA@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It may be no different than using Google as the search engine on safari, assuming I get an opt out. If it’s used for Siri interactions then that gets extremely tricky for one to verify that your interactions aren’t being used to inform adds and or train an LLM. Much harder to opt out vs default search engine there, perhaps.
LLMs do not need terabytes of ram. Heck you can run quantized 7billion param models on 16gb or less (Bloom, Falcon7B — falcon outperforms models with higher memory by the way, so there’s room here for optimization). While not quite as good as openAIs offerings, they’re still quite good. There are Android phones with 24gb of ram so it’s quite possible for Apple to release an iPhone pro with that much, and run it similar to running any large language model on an M1 or M2 Mac. Hell you could probably fit an inference only model in less. Performance wouldn’t be blazing but depending on the task, it could absolutely be sufficient. With Apple MLX and Ferret coming online it’s totally possible that you could, basically today, have a reasonable LLM running on an iPhone 15 Pro. People run OpenHermes 7B for example which uses ~4.4GB to run, without those frameworks. Battery life does take a major hit, but to be honest I’m at a loss for what I need an LLM for on my phone anyways.
Regardless, I want a local LLM or none at all.