According to a research document, Apple and its Apple Intelligence chose Nvidia over other options when selecting the equipment to train Tim Cook’s AI. And that means a lot.
It seems that Apple no longer wanted to support Nvidia in the market by giving the task of training its AI, so it chose Nvidia’s long-time competitor and partner: Sundar Pichai and his company.
However, in its document, Apple shares that its Apple Foundation Model (AFM), with 2.73 billion parameters, is based on clusters in the cloud of tensor processing units (TPU) v4 and v5p that are usually provided by Google, from the Alphabet Inc. matrix.
Apple’s AI is based on the use of TPU instead of GPU, as is customary
The Apple research paper, published today, covers its training infrastructure and other details for the AI models that will power the features announced at WWDC earlier this year. Apple announced both on-device AI processing and cloud processing, and at the heart of these AI features lies the Apple Foundation Model, nicknamed AFM.
For AFM on server, or the model that will power the AI functions in the cloud called Apple Cloud Compute, Apple shared that it trains a 6.3 trillion token AI model “from scratch” on “8,192 TPUv4 chips”. Google’s TPUv4 chips are available in pods formed by 4,096 chips each.
Apple added that AFM models (both on-device and in the cloud) are trained on TPUv4 chips and TPU clusters in the v5p cloud. This v5p is part of Google’s AI “supercomputer” in the cloud, and was announced last December.
Each v5p pod is made up of 8,960 chips each and, according to Google, it offers twice the floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) and triple the memory than TPU v4 to train models almost three times faster.
For on-device AI model for functions like writing and image selection, Apple uses a 6.4 billion parameter model “trained from scratch with the same recipe as AFM-server.”
Apple also chose to rely on the old TPU v4 chips for the AFM server model. As mentioned earlier, it used 8,092 v4 TPU chips, but for the AFM model on the device, the company chose to rely on the newer chips. According to Apple, this model was trained with 2,048 v5p TPU chips.
