Picture: Apple
Apple makes use of Amazon Internet Companies’ customized synthetic intelligence chips to energy its search companies. The corporate can be evaluating if it could actually use Amazon’s newest AI chips to pre-train Apple Intelligence fashions.
Apple’s Benoit Dupin, senior director of machine studying and AI, made these revelations in a shock look at Amazon’s annual AWS re:Reinvent convention.
Customized AWS AI chips ship as much as 50% effectivity enchancment
It’s uncommon for Apple to overtly speak about and reward one among its suppliers or distributors. Throughout his look, Dupin revealed that Apple has been utilizing Amazon Internet Companies to energy its cloud companies, equivalent to iCloud, Apple Maps, and Siri, for greater than a decade.
The manager highlighted that utilizing Amazon’s customized chips led to a 40% effectivity acquire. As a result of these advantages, Apple is contemplating utilizing AWS’ customized AI chips to pre-train its proprietary AI fashions.
Apparently, AWS CEO Matt Garman even revealed to CNBC that Apple got here to Amazon and requested the way it might assist them construct their generative AI capabilities and the required infrastructure for this.
Dupin notes that “In early phases of evaluating Trainium2 we anticipate early numbers as much as 50% enchancment in effectivity with pretaining.”
Apple Intelligence will proceed utilizing Apple silicon-powered Personal Cloud Compute
On the AWS Summit, Amazon introduced the overall availability of its Trainium2 chips for coaching and deploying LLMs (massive language fashions). A single Trainium2-powered EC2 occasion is provided with 16 T2 chips. This allows one instnace to ship as much as 20.8 petaflops of compute efficiency.
Observe that Apple solely plans to make use of Amazon’s customized AI chips to pre-train its AI fashions. It is not going to use them to energy Apple Intelligence options. For the latter, the corporate makes use of Personal Cloud Compute infrastructure, which makes use of M2 Extremely-powered servers. It plans to modify to quicker and extra environment friendly M4-powered variants subsequent yr.
The vast majority of corporations use Nvidia’s GPU for AI coaching. Apple is one notable exception, utilizing its personal Apple silicon chips or different non-x86 SoCs to coach its AI fashions.