Amazon CEO Andy Jassy talks with CNBC's Jim Cramer about Mad Money in Seattle, Washington. On December 6, 2023.
CNBC
apple Currently used Amazon Custom web services AI chips for services like search and will evaluate whether the company's latest AI chips can be used to pre-train its models as Apple Intelligence.
Apple revealed its use of Amazon's proprietary chips at its annual AWS Reinvent conference on Tuesday. Benoit Dupin, Apple's senior director of machine learning and artificial intelligence, took the stage to discuss how Apple uses the cloud. It is a rare example of a company officially allowing a supplier to promote them as a customer.
“We have a strong relationship, the infrastructure is reliable and we are able to serve our customers around the world,” Apple's Dubin said.
Apple's appearance at Amazon's conference and embrace of the company's chips is a strong endorsement of the cloud service as it competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for AI spending. Apple uses these cloud services as well.
Apple has used AWS for more than a decade for services including Siri, Apple Maps and Apple Music, Benoit said. Apple has used Amazon's Trinium and Graviton chips to power search services, for example, and Benoit said Amazon's chips led to a 40% increase in efficiency.
But Benoit also suggested that Apple could use Amazon's Trainium2 chip to pre-train its own models. It's a sign that Amazon's chips are not only a more cost-effective way to infer AI models than x86 CPUs made by Intel and AMD, but can also be used to develop new AI. Amazon announced Tuesday that its Trainium2 chip is generally available for rent.
“In the early stages of evaluating Trainium2, we expect an efficiency improvement of up to 50% early with pre-training,” Dobbin said.
Earlier this year, Apple said in a research paper that it used Google Cloud's TPU chips to train its iPhone AI service, which it calls Apple Intelligence.
The majority of AI training is done using expensive Nvidia graphics processors. Cloud providers and startups are racing to develop alternatives for lower costs and are exploring different approaches that could lead to more efficient processing. Apple's use of chips intended for other companies could indicate that non-Nvidia training methods could work.
AWS is expected to announce new details on Tuesday about offering Nvidia Blackwell-based AI servers for rent as well.
Apple released its first major AI product this fall. Apple Intelligence is a series of services that can summarize notifications, rewrite emails, and create new emojis. Later this month, it will be integrated with OpenAI's ChatGPT, the company says, and next year, Siri will get new capabilities to control apps and speak naturally.
Unlike leading chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Apple's approach to AI doesn't rely on large clusters of Nvidia-based servers in the cloud. Instead, Apple uses the iPhone, iPad, or Mac chip to do as much processing as possible, and then sends complex queries to servers run by Apple using its M-series chips.
