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.
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.
