Recently, the internal turmoil within Apple's artificial intelligence (AI) team has attracted widespread attention. According to the latest report, Apple's AI foundation model team had planned to open-source several of its self-developed models to showcase its technical progress in the AI field. However, this proposal was rejected by Apple's senior vice president, Craig Federighi.

The report states that Federighi clearly stated in an internal email that there are already many excellent open-source models in the market that can support academic research, so Apple does not need to participate. He particularly worried that if their own models were open-sourced, the outside world would notice that these models, after being optimized for iPhones, have a significant performance drop compared to versions running on high-performance PCs or data centers.

Metaverse, Sci-fi, Cyberpunk Painting (1) Large Model

Image source note: The image is AI-generated, and the image licensing service provider is Midjourney

This decision caused strong dissatisfaction within Apple. Many team members believe that Apple's "device-first" strategy is limiting the potential development of its AI technology. It is worth noting that Federighi himself had previously expressed similar views to the former team leader, Pang Ruoming, who has since left.

Apple's "Apple Intelligence" project launched last year has always emphasized user privacy protection, and on-device processing is seen as the key to achieving this commitment. However, this strategy has clearly brought considerable technical limitations to Apple's AI features.

More notably, Apple recently announced the delay of a major update to Siri, which came as a surprise to many AI team members. Related to this, Apple is considering abandoning its fully self-developed approach and instead seeking collaboration with third-party large language models (LLMs). Reports indicate that Apple has contacted OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to explore how to use these large models to enhance Siri's technical support.

In the increasingly competitive AI market, Apple's decisions will have a profound impact on its future direction.