When Apple introduced its take on artificially intelligent services, it led with a partnership with the hottest name in pre-generative technologies, OpenAI, however, it left open opportunities to work with others in the space and it now appears one of those ‘others’ is Amazon.
At the AWS re:Invent 2024 developer conference, senior director of machine learning and AI at Apple Benoit Dupin spilled the beans on the company’s exploration of Amazon’s AWS custom AI chip hardware.
Dupin’s remarks came in reference to how Apple is already making use of AWS services in its own cloud infrastructure.
We have a strong relationship, and the infrastructure is both reliable and able to serve our customers worldwide
Benoit Dupin – Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI
Apple has leveraged AWS for a host of its software services such as Apple Maps, Siri, and Apple Music over the past ten years and Inferentia and Graviton chips to power searches on its various platforms.
However, the bigger reveal is that Apple is planning to use Amazon’s latest Trainium2 chip to start train the company’s in-house language models.
Dupin frontloaded its endorsement of Amazon’s chips by stating, “In early stages of evaluating Trainium2 we expect early numbers up to 50% improvement in efficiency with pretraining.”
Apple made note of Trainium2 for good reason it would appear with the chip combined with AWS’ UltraServers achieving up to 83.2 petaflops of sparse FP8 leading to improved low-latency and higher bandwidth transfers.
While Apple is laying on the endorsement of Trainium2 pretty thick, the company is still showcasing OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the leading AI partnership on many of its consumer products. In addition, Apple also reminded the industry that its working with Google’s Cloud, Gemini LLM and TPU chips with its Apple Intelligence efforts.
Apple may be comfortable playing the field, but its latest pretraining partnership sends a clear industry message to others in the space such as Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Intel that it is planning to compete at scale with them.
Apple joins the parade of tech companies pursuing custom chip production in the wake of AI-branded and powered services rolling out to businesses and customers.
As for Amazon, the company is already looking towards Trainium3 which it plans to have out by late 2025, and a supercomputer dubbed The Ultracluster to along with its UltraSevers.
Apple is still in the process of gradually rolling out its vision of Apple Intelligence to mixed reviews, so it has yet to be seen how well the company will leverage its partnerships and new technologies for AI.
