iOS 18 Billed as Apple's First 'AI-Native' OS

The underlying strategy for Apple's AI push is internally codenamed "Project Greymatter," a suite of tools integrated into core apps. The architecture employs a hybrid model: a ~3 billion parameter language model runs on-device for tasks like summarization and smart replies, ensuring personal data never leaves the iPhone. For more computationally intensive requests, Apple routes tasks to "Private Cloud Compute." This system utilizes dedicated servers running on Apple Silicon, which process user data without storing it or making it accessible to Apple, a key privacy differentiator. The system analyzes a request first to see if it can be handled on-device before passing necessary data to the private cloud. Apple's foundational large language model, developed under the internal project name "Ajax," powers many of these features. For queries requiring extensive world knowledge that falls outside the scope of its trained models, Apple has integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT, which users can access with explicit permission for each request. For developers, Apple is not providing direct API access to its foundation models. Instead, integration happens through structured frameworks like an updated App Intents, which allows Siri to intelligently surface and trigger an app's actions based on user context. A new Foundation Models framework also allows developers to add capabilities like text summarization directly into their apps, running on the on-device model. This deep integration enables a system-wide "Semantic Indexing" that creates a private, on-device map of your personal data. This allows a more context-aware Siri to fulfill requests like "pull up the podcast link my wife sent me last week" by understanding the relationships and content within your apps. New user-facing tools are built on this stack, including "Genmoji" for creating custom emoji on the fly and Image Playground for AI image generation within apps like Messages and Notes. The Photos app also gets a "Clean Up" tool that can identify and remove distracting background objects without altering the main subject. These advanced AI functionalities are computationally demanding, restricting their availability. Apple Intelligence features require an iPhone 15 Pro or later with the A17 Pro chip, or an iPad or Mac with an M1 chip or later.