Apple Intelligence Not Trained on YouTube Content, Says Apple

Apple on Thursday addressed concerns about its use of AI training data, following an investigation that revealed Apple, along with other major tech companies, had used YouTube subtitles to train their artificial intelligence models.

Apple Intelligence General Feature
The investigation by Wired earlier this week reported that over 170,000 videos from popular content creators were part of a dataset used to train AI models. Apple specifically used this dataset in the development of its open-source OpenELM models, which were made public in April.

However, Apple has now confirmed to 9to5Mac that OpenELM does not power any of its AI or machine learning features, including the company's Apple Intelligence system. Apple clarified that OpenELM was created solely for research purposes, with the aim of advancing open-source large language model development.

On releasing OpenELM on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code, Apple researchers described it as a "state-of-the-art open language model" that had been designed to "empower and enrich the open research community." The model is also available through Apple's Machine Learning Research website. Apple has stated that it has no plans to develop new versions of the OpenELM model.

The company emphasized that since OpenELM is not integrated into ‌Apple Intelligence‌, the "YouTube Subtitles" dataset is not being used to power any of its commercial AI features. Apple reiterated its previous statement that ‌Apple Intelligence‌ models are trained on "licensed data, including data selected to enhance specific features, as well as publicly available data collected by our web-crawler."

The Wired report detailed how companies including Apple, Anthropic, and NVIDIA had used the "YouTube Subtitles" dataset for AI model training. This dataset is part of a larger collection known as "The Pile," which is compiled by the non-profit organization EleutherAI.

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Top Rated Comments

sniffies Avatar
9 months ago
Thank god for that. Training on YouTube videos from popular content creators would render Apple Intelligence pretty unintelligent.
Score: 25 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Havalo Avatar
9 months ago
Never believe anything until it’s been officially denied - Sir Humphrey (Yes, Minister)
Score: 13 Votes (Like | Disagree)
foobarbaz Avatar
9 months ago

Like a person, it could have been exposed to anything out in the wild and we don’t walk around with a list of references. But we treat this software differently to people… you wouldn’t let anyone off the street on your iPhone or laptop… similar goes for AI.
I think you're humanizing the AI too much. It's not a person searching knowledge "in the wild". It is a large file that has been created by a training algorithm which is given a lot of crawled data as the input. It doesn't learn anything outside of what its creators are passing along. And crucially, once training is complete, it's no longer acquiring knowledge. (Every interaction you have with it starts with a blank slate or explicit "context" given from your previous sessions/personal data.)

So the model's creators know absolutely what has been used to train it. They're generally just cagey about it, because they don't want to be sued once they admit whose copyrighted content they've used.
Score: 7 Votes (Like | Disagree)
peneaux Avatar
9 months ago

Thank god for that. Training on YouTube videos from popular content creators would render Apple Intelligence very unintelligent.
Unintelligent is a very polite way of saying garbage.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Fuzzball84 Avatar
9 months ago
How do we truly know what they have been trained on?

Like a person, it could have been exposed to anything out in the wild and we don’t walk around with a list of references. But we treat this software differently to people… you wouldn’t let anyone off the street on your iPhone or laptop… similar goes for AI.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
antiprotest Avatar
9 months ago
I believe Apple on this, because from all that we have heard this thing is going to be so delayed that at this point it hasn't been trained on ANY content.
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)