Apple hopping on the AI bandwagon with Apple Intelligence was an inevitable thing, and the upcoming iOS 18.1 update will bring all that new AI fluff to your new iPhone 16. But Apple will allocate a considerable chunk of your storage to these AI capabilities.
Apple’s generative AI model, the Apple Foundation Model (AFM), will be stored on-device for use on your iPhone, and it will initially require 4GB of device storage. Apple Intelligence will be available on iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, iPhone 16 series, and Mac models with M1 and later Apple Silicon. 4GB is not a lot right now, as your phone comes with at least 128GB of storage and you probably bought a model with an even larger storage size. But the big thing is that Apple has warned that the storage space required for the on-device model will increase over time as more features are added. This is, after all, the very first generation of Apple’s AI model, and it will keep evolving just like ChatGPT or Google Gemini have.
The Apple Foundation Model (AFM) is a 3-billion-parameter generative model designed to run efficiently on mobile devices. To keep its size down, Apple is quantizing the model at 4-bits or less. This compression technique allows the model to take up significantly less storage space without sacrificing quality. Apple Intelligence will utilize “adapters” to provide specific capabilities like summarization, proofreading, and Mail replies. These adapters will be loaded and unloaded on the fly, requiring about 10s of megabytes each. Still, once you add it all up, it takes up a considerable amount of your storage, which is how we’re landing on that 4GB figure.
It’s not hard to run against a 128GB storage limit between apps, media, and more stuff. Once you start getting closer to that limit (a chunk is already allocated to the OS and other essential software, so you always get less than the 128GB you usually get and you’ll get even less now), every gigabyte counts.
Hopefully, this doesn’t end up being a problem in the long run.
Source: The Register