As reported by CNBC, Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and artificial intelligence, made an unexpected visit to Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas today.
During his presentation, Dupin highlighted that Apple leverages custom AI chips provided by Amazon Web Services to enhance a variety of its cloud services. Additionally, the company is assessing the potential of Amazon’s latest AI chip for pre-training its Apple Intelligence models.
While addressing the audience, Dupin praised the utilization of AWS chips, such as Graviton and Inferentia, which Apple has employed for over ten years to support Siri, as well as services like the App Store, Apple Music, and Apple Maps. By using these chips, Apple has achieved a 40% increase in efficiency compared to traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD.
“Our relationship is robust, and the infrastructure is dependable and capable of serving our global customer base,” Dupin remarked. Before joining Apple in 2014, he held the position of vice president at Amazon’s A9 Search Technology group.
Dupin also indicated that Apple is currently evaluating the new AWS AI training chip, referred to as Trainium2. He stated that Apple anticipates “up to a 50% enhancement in efficiency with pre-training” when using the Trainium2 chip.
The integration of Trainium2 by Apple is anticipated to focus on pre-training artificial intelligence models, rather than being directly utilized for Apple Intelligence features.
Apple Intelligence capabilities are powered either on-device or via the cloud using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute platform, which is structured around Apple’s proprietary Silicon chips.
Earlier this year, Apple confirmed in a research paper that it has utilized Google Tensor chips to train its AI models. This decision was significant, as it marked Apple’s choice for Google’s Tensor chips over the more commonly used Nvidia chips by other firms.
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