Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spoke with CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Mad Money, discussing Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) custom artificial intelligence chips. Apple has been using AWS’ chips for services like search, and is evaluating the use of the latest AI chip, Trainium2, to pretrain its models like Apple Intelligence.
Apple’s senior director of machine learning and AI, Benoit Dupin, revealed the company’s usage of Amazon’s proprietary chips at the annual AWS Reinvent conference. Dupin stated that Apple has used AWS for over a decade for services including Siri, Apple Maps, and Apple Music, and that the company’s chips have led to a 40% efficiency gain.
AWS CEO Matt Garman noted that Apple was an early adopter and beta-tester for the company’s Trainium chips, and that the company came to AWS seeking infrastructure to develop its Generative AI capabilities. Apple’s usage of custom chips could signal to other companies that non-Nvidia training approaches can work.
Apple’s approach to AI is different from that of leading chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is 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 sends complicated queries to Apple-operated servers using its own M-series chips.
The company’s usage of AWS’ chips is a strong endorsement of the cloud service as it competes with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for AI spending. Apple’s integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT is expected to happen later this month, and Siri will gain new abilities to control apps and speak naturally next year.
