Amazon Web Services chips will reportedly be used to train Apple Intelligence models, which is not something out of the ordinary because technology giants are known for sourcing such hardware. Of course, it will be the Cupertino firm’s responsibility to ensure that its services will be used with a layer of privacy, but it appears that both entities will work together to ensure a singular goal.
During the annual AWS Reinvent conference held on Tuesday, CNBC reports that Benoit Dupin, who is Apple’s Senior Director of machine learning and AI, discussed how the company plans to use the cloud service, stating that the firm has a strong relationship with Amazon, and its infrastructure is reliable and able to serve users worldwide. Apple has taken advantage of AWS for more than a decade now, which allows it to present services such as Apple Maps, Siri, Apple Music, and more.
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As for why Amazon’s custom chips would be used to train Apple Intelligence models, the company executive mentioned that the partnership has led to a 40 percent efficiency improvement in searches. Dupin has also said that Apple is evaluating Amazon’s Trainium2 chip for potential use in pre-training its AI models. On top of the features already offered by Apple Intelligence, more additions will arrive. Dupin also mentioned that during the early stages of using Trainium2, Apple expects early figures to display up to a 50 percent efficiency improvement.
Efficiency improvements will mean it will cost less to train Apple Intelligence models. These savings can also mean that the California-based titan can train additional models for the same cost. Naturally, Apple’s ‘marketing cry’ regarding privacy will be questioned thanks to its alliance with Amazon, but it is likely that both companies will have some countermeasures prepared.
Apple’s use of Amazon’s custom chips could also encourage other companies to reduce dependency on NVIDIA and look for more affordable alternatives. Apple’s strength lies in letting its iPhones, iPads, or Macs perform the on-device processing as much as possible, then offload the more complicated queries to its services that rely on its own M-series of chipsets. This approach is vastly different from others, which take advantage of massive clusters of servers stacked with NVIDIA GPUs.
News Source: CNBC