Apple claims to use Amazon’s custom AI chips

Apple currently using Amazon Web Services’ custom AI chips for services like search and will evaluate whether the company’s latest AI chip can be used to pre-train its models like Apple Intelligence.

Apple revealed its use of Amazon’s proprietary chips at the annual AWS Reinvent conference on Tuesday. Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, took the stage to discuss how Apple uses the cloud service. This is a rare example of a company officially allowing a supplier to present them as a customer.

“We have a strong relationship and the infrastructure is both reliable and capable of serving our customers around the world,” said Apple’s Dupin.

Apple’s participation in Amazon’s conference and its adoption of the company’s chips provide strong support for the cloud service, which rivals Microsoft Azure and Google The cloud for AI spending. Apple also uses these cloud services.

Dupin said Apple has used AWS for more than a decade for services such as Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music. Apple used Amazon’s Inferentia and Graviton chips to serve search services, for example, and Dupin said Amazon’s chips led to a 40% efficiency gain.

But Dupin also suggested that Apple would use Amazon’s Trainium2 chip to pre-train its proprietary models. It’s a sign that Amazon’s chips aren’t just a cost-effective way to infer AI models compared to x86 core processors made by Intel And AMDbut can also be used to develop new AI. Amazon announced Tuesday that its Trainium2 chip is generally available for rental.

“In the early stages of evaluating Trainium2, we expect early numbers of up to 50% improvement in efficiency with pre-training,” Dupin said.

AWS CEO Matt Garman said in an interview with CNBC on Tuesday that Apple was an early adopter and beta-tester of the company’s Trainium chips.

Apple “came to us and said, ‘How can you help us with our generative AI capabilities, we need infrastructure to be able to build,’ and they had this vision to develop Apple intelligence” , Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, told CNBC. Kate Rooney.

Earlier this year, Apple said in a research paper that it used TPU chips from Google Cloud to train its iPhone AI service, which it calls Apple Intelligence.

The majority of AI training is done on expensive media Nvidia graphics processors. Cloud providers and startups are working to develop cost-saving alternatives and exploring different approaches that could lead to more efficient processing. Apple’s use of custom chips could signal to other companies that non-Nvidia training approaches can work.

AWS is also expected to announce new details on Tuesday about the proposed leasing of Nvidia Blackwell-based AI servers.

Apple launched its first major generative AI product this fall. Apple Intelligence is a series of services that can summarize notifications, rewrite emails, and generate new emojis. Later this month, it will integrate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company says, and next year Siri will get new capabilities for controlling apps and speaking naturally.

Unlike leading chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Apple’s approach to AI does not rely on large clusters of Nvidia-based servers in the cloud. Instead, Apple uses an iPhone, iPad, or Mac chip to do as much processing as possible, then sends complex requests to Apple-operated servers using its own M-series chips.