Apple’s use of fake data to train AI is not as weird as it sounds, here’s why

Last weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and Drake Bennett published a comprehensive look into what went wrong with Apple Intelligence. The piece details everything from years-long oversights to a deep misunderstanding of AI’s potential at the company’s highest levels. But more importantly, it also outlines what Apple is doing now to catch up. One of those efforts? A push into synthetic data. As Gurman and Bennett put it: All this has left Apple’s researchers more heavily reliant on datasets it licenses from third parties and on so-called synthetic data—artificial data created expressly to train AI. And Thanks to a recent software update, iPhones have also been enlisted to help improve Apple’s synthetic data. The fake data is assessed and enhanced by comparing it with the language in user emails on their phones, providing real-world reference points for AI training without feeding actual user information into the models. If this idea sounds weird, here’s the first thing you should k ... Read full article.