Apple details how it plans to improve its AI models by privately analyzing user data

In the wake of criticism over the underwhelming performance of its AI products, especially in areas like notification summaries, Apple on Monday detailed how it is trying to improve its AI models by analyzing user data privately with the aid of synthetic data.

Using an approach called “differential privacy,” the company said it would first generate synthetic data and then poll users’ devices (provided they’ve opted-in to share device analytics with Apple) with snippets of the generated synthetic data to compare how accurate its models are, and subsequently improve them.

“Synthetic data are created to mimic the format and important properties of user data, but do not contain any actual user generated content,” the company wrote in a blog post. “To curate a representative set of synthetic emails, we start by creating a large set of synthetic messages on a variety of topics […] We then derive a representation, called an embedding, of each synthetic message that captures some of the key dimensions of the message like language, topic, and length.”

The company said these embeddings are then sent to a small number of user devices that have opted in to Device Analytics, and the devices then compare them with a sample of emails to tell Apple which embeddings are most accurate.

The company said it is using this approach to improve its Genmoji models, and would in the future use synthetic data for Image Playground, Image Wand, Memories Creation and Writing Tools as well as Visual Intelligence. Apple said it would also poll users who opt in to share device analytics with synthetic data to improve email summaries.