Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was interviewed on Mad Money by CNBC host Jim Cramer in Seattle, Washington. December 6, 2023.
CNBC
apple currently in use Amazon Web Services’ customized artificial intelligence chips are used in services such as search, and it will evaluate whether the company’s latest artificial intelligence chips can be used to pre-train models such as Apple Intelligence.
Apple revealed its use of Amazon’s proprietary chips on Tuesday at the annual AWS Reinvent conference. Benoit Dupin, Apple’s senior director of machine learning and artificial intelligence, took the stage to discuss how Apple uses cloud services. This is a rare instance of the company formally allowing a supplier to treat it as a customer.
“We have strong relationships and a reliable, well-defined infrastructure to serve our customers around the world,” Apple’s Durbin said.
Apple’s presence at Amazon’s conference and using the company’s chips is a strong endorsement of cloud services as it competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for artificial intelligence spending. Apple also uses these cloud services.
Benoit said Apple has used AWS to provide services such as Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music for more than ten years. For example, Apple uses Amazon’s Trainium and Graviton chips to provide search services. Benoit said that Amazon’s chips increased efficiency by 40%.
But Benoit also suggested that Apple will use Amazon’s Trainium2 chips to pre-train its proprietary models. This shows that Amazon’s chips are not only a cost-effective way to reason about artificial intelligence models compared to x86 CPUs made by Intel and AMD, but can also be used to develop new artificial intelligence. Amazon announced on Tuesday that its Trainium2 chips are now generally available for rent.
“In the early stages of evaluating Trainium2, we expected that pre-training early data would improve efficiency by 50%,” Dupin said.
Earlier this year, Apple said in a research paper that it had used TPU chips from Google Cloud to train its iPhone AI service, called Apple Intelligence.
Most artificial intelligence training is done on expensive Nvidia graphics processors. Cloud providers and startups are racing to develop alternatives that reduce costs and are exploring different ways to achieve more efficient processing. Apple’s use of custom chips could send a signal to other companies that non-Nvidia training methods can work.
AWS is expected to announce new details on Tuesday about offering Nvidia Blackwell-based AI servers for rent.
Apple released its first major generative artificial intelligence product this fall. Apple Intelligence is a set of services that aggregate notifications, rewrite emails, and generate new emojis. Later this month, it will integrate with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and next year, Siri will gain new capabilities for controlling apps and speaking naturally, the company said.
Unlike leading chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Apple’s AI approach is not based 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, and then uses its own M-series chips to send complex queries to servers operated by Apple.
