Apple said in a technical paper on Monday that the two AI models underpinning Apple Intelligence, its AI system, were pretrained on Google-designed chips in the cloud. This signals that some Big Tech companies may be looking for alternatives to Nvidia’s graphics processing units when it comes to AI training.
The artificial intelligence models were trained on processors designed by Google, a sign that big tech companies are looking for alternatives to Nvidia when it comes to the training of cutting-edge AI. Apple’s choice of Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) for training was detailed in a technical paper just published by the company. Separately, Apple released a preview version of Apple Intelligence for some devices on Monday.
Nvidia’s pricey graphics processing units (GPUs) dominate the market for high-end AI training chips, and have been in such high demand over the past couple years that they’ve been difficult to procure in the required quantities. OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic are all using Nvidia’s GPUs for their models, while other tech companies, including Google, Meta, Oracle, and Tesla are snapping them up to build out their AI systems and offerings.
Apple doesn’t name Google or Nvidia in its 47-page paper, but did note its Apple Foundation Model (AFM) and AFM server are trained on “Cloud TPU clusters.” That means Apple rented servers from a cloud provider to perform the calculations.
The system includes several new features, such as a refreshed look for Siri, better natural language processing, and AI-generated summaries in text fields. Over the next year, Apple plans to roll out functions based on generative AI, including image generation, emoji generation, and a powered-up Siri that can access the user’s personal information and take actions inside of apps.
Apple said that AFM on-device was trained on a single “slice” of 2048 TPU v5p chips working together. That’s the most advanced TPU, first launched in December. AFM-server was trained on 8192 TPU v4 chips that were configured to work together as eight slices through a data center network.
Google’s latest TPUs cost under $2 per hour the chip is in use when booked for three years in advance, according to Google’s website.
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/29/apple-says-its-ai-models-were-trained-on-googles-custom-chips-.html