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Apple’s substantial AI upgrade has been rumored for a long time, but we got a closer look Monday at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference. One of the biggest drops was the five new Apple Intelligence models that were built in partnership with Google.
Apple Intelligence was a prominent part of Apple’s software news, culminating in the revamped Siri AI personal assistant. We also heard about the new MacOS Golden Gate, new Vision Pro-inspired AI photography tools and what may be inside the upcoming iOS 27.
“We believe that truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said during the WWDC keynote video presentation.
Here’s what you need to know about the new AI models and where they will show up across your Apple devices.
Watch this: iOS 27 Has Us Excited for Siri, Again
5 new foundational models
Apple and Google released five new AI models. Don’t expect clever names from this family of Apple Foundation Models. They include:
- AFM 3 Core: The 3 billion parameter base model is designed to run on your iPhone or Mac.
- AFM 3 Core Advanced: Apple calls this multimodal 20-billion parameter model its “most powerful on-device model.”
- AFM 3 Cloud: As the name suggestions, this model runs in cloud servers.
- AFM 3 Cloud (Image): This image AI model powers the new AI photo editing tools and Image Playground updates.
- AFM 3 Cloud Pro: This is the most advanced cloud-based model Apple offers, meant to support “demanding use cases, like agentic tool use and complex reasoning.”
These models are a little bit different than the chatbot or agents you may interact with. They are the technological bedrock of AI work; they’re the roads you drive on, not the car. The car in this scenario — the way you interact with the AI models — is with the new Siri. And the new Siri AI will be everywhere on compatible devices, on your iPhone, Mac, Watch and even in your AirPods.
Developers can use Apple’s Core AI to build with the new AI.
All the models come with Apple’s private cloud compute infrastructure, which basically says Apple doesn’t store your data and chat logs. Apple says AFM 3 Cloud Pro still has this privacy guarantee even though it runs through Google Cloud, using Nvidia GPUs. The average AI user won’t have to worry too much about this, but these are important considerations for businesses.
These AI images were made using the new Apple Foundational Model 3 Cloud.
Apple says the new models were trained, or built, using publicly available data, data licensed by the company and synthetic data. The company says it doesn’t use information from its users and their interactions with Apple AI. It also notes, without specifics, that it “respects the rights of web publishers” that opt out of AI training.
What’s new inside Apple’s AI
Some things about Apple’s AI aren’t really new. The company is leaning particularly heavily toward on-device AI, meaning smaller models are built to run on your iPhone, iPad or Mac, rather than in the cloud. The new foundation models have been tailored to run on-device. Apple touted privacy as a cornerstone, noting that it doesn’t store your data or chat logs.
AI-forward features like its upgraded Siri look largely like more powerful versions of what we’ve already had for years. A Siri that better understands what you say? That’s an upgrade, but hardly revolutionary. Allowing Siri to better understand context by giving it more access to your information means the assistant will be more useful.
What is new? A more powerful on-device model is multimodal, meaning it can understand speech and images, Federighi said. It’s also more accurate with dictation and language understanding. A system orchestrator can coordinate across models, while Apple Intelligence can also work across your apps.
Compared to rivals like Google, Apple has been relatively slow on the AI front. Its models and tools haven’t become household names like ChatGPT, and it hasn’t had viral moments like Anthropic’s Claude Code or Google’s Nano Banana image generator. But the company has been thoughtful about how it integrates generative AI into its products, gradually rolling out new AI-powered features.
Rather than having AI stand out, Apple appears to want it to disappear into the operating system, said Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of client devices at analyst IDC. He said in an email that Apple’s goal is for its AI to be trustworthy and invisible to the user.
“The impact could be significant,” Jeronimo said. “If Apple makes AI feel natural, private and useful for mainstream users, it will not just strengthen its ecosystem. It could redefine what consumers expect from every device they use.”
