Las Vegas, NV - December 3, 2024 - Apple is evaluating the use of Amazon's latest custom AI chips, specifically the Trainium2 processor, for pre-training its Apple Intelligence models, as confirmed by Benoit Dupin, Apple's senior director of machine learning and AI, at the AWS re:Invent conference.
Dupin highlighted Apple's decade-long reliance on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for various services, including Siri, Apple Music, and Apple Maps. He noted that Amazon's Inferentia and Graviton chips have contributed to a 40% efficiency gain in these applications.
During his presentation, Dupin indicated that initial evaluations of the Trainium2 chip suggest a potential 50% improvement in efficiency for pre-training tasks. This marks a significant step in Apple's strategy to leverage alternative AI processing solutions.
While Apple has utilized Google Cloud's TPU chips for some model training, it has not publicly acknowledged any use of Nvidia's offerings, which dominate the AI training landscape. Dupin's remarks suggest a shift towards diversifying the company's AI infrastructure.
Apple's generative AI product, Apple Intelligence, was released this fall, offering features such as notification summarization and email rewriting. Future integrations, including collaboration with OpenAI's ChatGPT, are also planned.