On-device LLM support could give Apple a huge AI advantage

Apple’s iOS 18 artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will purportedly function entirely on your iPhone, eliminating the need for cloud processing — and, as noted, Forbes says this will “deal a blow” to Google.

If Apple releases on-device large language model (LLM) support that’s truly good, private, and available to developers it will give Apple a huge advantage. They won’t have to pay for data centers to support the users (on-device resources instead), cash in on their “trust” marketing, justify people buying their products since things like Adobe Acrobat’s $4.99 monthly subscription won’t be needed. 

“As far as that goes, if Apple enables access to quality Generative Intelligence (GenAI) to developers and their built-in automation, things like OpenAI’s subscription will also be unnecessary. This is all especially true if Apple can break out of their annual upgrade cycle and move to a agile release schedule,” says entrepeneur/Intrepeneur J. Scott Anderson. “If you look at what Adobe is charing $5 a month for with the Acrobat subscription to enable chatting with your PDF documents, you can easily see that Apple Preview (or other PDF apps like PDF Expert or PDFGear) can do with built-in GenAI. Add strong Shortcut support and you can eliminate many of the Zapier-like service needs.”

By the way, a LLM is a language model notable for its ability to achieve general-purpose language generation and other natural language processing tasks such as classification. GenAI is a type of Artificial Intelligence that can create a wide variety of data, such as images, videos, audio, text, and 3D models. And Zapier is an automation tool.