Apple releases open source AI models that run on the device

Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open Source Efficient Language Models), LLM programs are available at The centerpiece of the hugging facea community for sharing AI code.

As shown in the white paper [PDF],There are eight total OpenELM models, four of which are ,pretrained using the CoreNet library, and four are ,instruction tuned models. Apple uses a layer scaling strategy aimed at improving accuracy and efficiency.

Apple provided code, training logs, and multiple versions rather than just the final training model, and the researchers behind the project hope this will lead to faster progress and “more trustworthy results” in the field of natural language AI.

OpenELM, an open evolving language model. OpenELM uses a layer scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, resulting in improved accuracy. For example, with a parameter budget of about 1 billion parameters, OpenELM shows a 2.36% improvement in accuracy over OLMo while requiring 2x fewer tokens to pre-train.

Breaking away from previous practices that only provide model weights, inference code, and pre-training on private datasets, our version includes the complete framework for training and evaluating the language model on publicly available datasets, including training logs, multiple checkpoints, and pre-points. Training configurations.

Apple says it is launching OpenELM models to “empower and enrich the open research community” with modern language models. Sharing models open source gives researchers a way to investigate risks, data, and model biases. Developers and businesses can use the templates as is or make modifications to them.

Open sharing of information has become an important tool for Apple to recruit top engineers, scientists, and experts because it provides opportunities for research papers that would not normally have been published under Apple's confidentiality policies.

Apple has yet to bring these types of AI capabilities to its devices, but iOS 18 is expected to include a number of new AI features, and rumors suggest that Apple plans to run its own large language models on the device for privacy purposes.