Amid criticism regarding the underperformance of its AI products. Particularly in areas like notification summaries, Apple has outlined how it plans to improve its AI models. On Monday, the tech giant introduced its strategy of utilizing synthetic data, paired with differential privacy. To enhance its AI capabilities while ensuring user privacy.
Apple explained that it would generate synthetic data that mimics the format and key properties of real user data without including any actual content. The company emphasized that this approach allows for better privacy management. To refine its models, Apple will collect feedback from users who have opted into sharing their device analytics. These users will receive snippets of the generated synthetic data on their devices to help Apple assess the accuracy of its models.
“Synthetic data mimics the essential aspects of real data, such as language, topic, and length. But contains no user-specific information,” Apple noted in a blog post. “We start by creating a broad range of synthetic messages on different topics, which are then transformed into embeddings. Representations that capture the core dimensions of the messages.”
These embeddings are then sent to a select group of devices with users who have agreed to share their device analytics. The devices compare the synthetic data with sample emails. Providing feedback to Apple on which synthetic embeddings most accurately represent real-world data.
This initiative is part of Apple’s effort to enhance its Genmoji models. And the company also plans to extend this synthetic data approach to improve other products. Such as Image Playground, Image Wand, Memories Creation, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. Additionally, Apple will use this method to refine its email summary features. Relying on the insights gathered from users who opt into device analytics.
