In the wake of criticism over the underwhelming performance of its AI products, especially in areas like notification summaries, Apple on Monday detailed how it is trying to improve its AI models by analyzing user data privately with the aid of synthetic data.
Using an approach called “differential privacy,” the company said it would first generate synthetic data and then poll users’ devices (provided they’ve opted-in to share device analytics with Apple) with snippets of the generated synthetic data to compare how accurate its models are, and subsequently improve them.
“Synthetic data are created to mimic the format and important properties of user data, but do not contain any actual user generated content,” the company wrote in a blog post. “To…