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Apple Trained its Apple Intelligence Models on Google TPUs, Not NVIDIA GPUs

AleksandarK

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Apple has disclosed that its newly announced Apple Intelligence features were developed using Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) rather than NVIDIA's widely adopted hardware accelerators like H100. This unexpected choice was detailed in an official Apple research paper, shedding light on the company's approach to AI development. The paper outlines how systems equipped with Google's TPUv4 and TPUv5 chips played a crucial role in creating Apple Foundation Models (AFMs). These models, including AFM-server and AFM-on-device, are designed to power both online and offline Apple Intelligence features introduced at WWDC 2024. For the training of the 6.4 billion parameter AFM-server, Apple's largest language model, the company utilized an impressive array of 8,192 TPUv4 chips, provisioned as 8×1024 chip slices. The training process involved a three-stage approach, processing a total of 7.4 trillion tokens. Meanwhile, the more compact 3 billion parameter AFM-on-device model, optimized for on-device processing, was trained using 2,048 TPUv5p chips.

Apple's training data came from various sources, including the Applebot web crawler and licensed high-quality datasets. The company also incorporated carefully selected code, math, and public datasets to enhance the models' capabilities. Benchmark results shared in the paper suggest that both AFM-server and AFM-on-device excel in areas such as Instruction Following, Tool Use, and Writing, positioning Apple as a strong contender in the AI race despite its relatively late entry. However, Apple's penetration tactic into the AI market is much more complex than any other AI competitor. Given Apple's massive user base and millions of devices compatible with Apple Intelligence, the AFM has the potential to change user interaction with devices for good, especially for everyday tasks. Hence, refining AI models for these tasks is critical before massive deployment. Another unexpected feature is transparency from Apple, a company typically known for its secrecy. The AI boom is changing some of Apple's ways, and revealing these inner workings is always interesting.



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Apple and Nvidia are not exactly on friendly terms, no surprise there.
 
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Is that why it's not very good?
 
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Is that why it's not very good?
Google has pedigree in this field; they introduced dedicated AI silicon well before Nvidia, but I think adoption is hampered by the relative inaccessibility of their TPUs. Nvidia's adoption is helped greatly by the wide availability of their hardware and excellent developer support and education.
 
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Is that why it's not very good?
Nvidia for all their $3 trillion worth of market cap, plus some change, isn't a patch on Google's experience in "AI" plus (TPU)hardware. Maybe if they can show something other than "fake frames" or fooling the rest of the startup ecosystem having to go with their overpriced GPU's then we'll talk :rolleyes:
 
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Not many people or corporations are on good terms with nGreedia... Karma will eventually catch up with the tech poseur.

But regarding the Apple models, I'm shocked that the server version is only twice the size of the on-device version.
 
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Not many people or corporations are on good terms with nGreedia

That's must be why they're the world's most valuable company :`)

When will you people realize that business is business, and grudges are something only forum dwellers hold... there's an obvious logic behind this choice - if anything, Google's far more antagonistic to Apple than Nvidia will ever be - the hardware likely operates the same way their in-SoC model does, just on a much larger scale.
 
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That's must be why they're the world's most valuable company :`)

When will you people realize that business is business, and grudges are something only forum dwellers hold... there's an obvious logic behind this choice - if anything, Google's far more antagonistic to Apple than Nvidia will ever be - the hardware likely operates the same way their in-SoC model does, just on a much larger scale.
That is how it should work. However, both Nvidia and Apple have been unforgiving in the past: Nvidia parted ways with XFX when they jumped on the AMD bandwagon with the RV770. Apple never forgave Nvidia for Bumpgate. Of course, by now it's a moot point as Apple devices only have Apple silicon for compute.
 
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The other major point which may have been lost in the flame wars is that Apple gets $20 billion or so from Google for their (iOS?) search deal so it's not like they wouldn't try to leverage that.

 
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That is how it should work. However, both Nvidia and Apple have been unforgiving in the past: Nvidia parted ways with XFX when they jumped on the AMD bandwagon with the RV770. Apple never forgave Nvidia for Bumpgate. Of course, by now it's a moot point as Apple devices only have Apple silicon for compute.

It's how business works. No matter how "great" the business partner is, there's always an imbalance of power when doing business with a much larger entity. XFX and EVGA were both inconsequential ants to Nvidia. Techies may even seem impressed, but XFX... just wasn't worth the squeeze. And neither was EVGA, really. That doesn't hurt Nvidia's reputation or bottom line in the slightest, quite the contrary, it's XFX that had to make do and thrive in adverse conditions as Radeons consistently failed to capture the lion's share of the market.

They also got Apple's business for at least 6-7 years after Bumpgate - if there was truly any bad blood here you'd never see nForce Macs in the early 2010s. They'd been cut off around 2008. AMD's deal with Apple was likely a combination of favorable pricing and software licensing provisions, considered that Apple likely were already considering transitioning to in-house silicon for at least a few years before the 2020 debut of M1.

You don't need to be on "good terms" for that, same reason why Aramco is also such a massive name!

Similar situation, the Saudi Royal Family is vastly wealthier and more powerful than any who would have legitimate beef with them. Aramco, as any state oil company (you could say the same about Petrobras here in Brazil), is a national treasury in the strictest sense of it - oil, energy = money.
 
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It's how business works. No matter how "great" the business partner is, there's always an imbalance of power when doing business with a much larger entity. XFX and EVGA were both inconsequential ants to Nvidia. Techies may even seem impressed, but XFX... just wasn't worth the squeeze. And neither was EVGA, really. That doesn't hurt Nvidia's reputation or bottom line in the slightest, quite the contrary, it's XFX that had to make do and thrive in adverse conditions as Radeons consistently failed to capture the lion's share of the market.

They also got Apple's business for at least 6-7 years after Bumpgate - if there was truly any bad blood here you'd never see nForce Macs in the early 2010s. They'd been cut off around 2008. AMD's deal with Apple was likely a combination of favorable pricing and software licensing provisions, considered that Apple likely were already considering transitioning to in-house silicon for at least a few years before the 2020 debut of M1.



Similar situation, the Saudi Royal Family is vastly wealthier and more powerful than any who would have legitimate beef with them. Aramco, as any state oil company (you could say the same about Petrobras here in Brazil), is a national treasury in the strictest sense of it - oil, energy = money.
You are right about the imbalance of power between Nvidia and its partners; however, that doesn't apply to their relationship with Apple at that time. You're also right about the continued use of Nvidia's products by Apple, but they ditched them in 2016 for the inferior Polaris based GPUs in their Macbooks. That seems rather irrational when Pascal was stomping all over Radeon.
 
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Google has pedigree in this field; they introduced dedicated AI silicon well before Nvidia, but I think adoption is hampered by the relative inaccessibility of their TPUs. Nvidia's adoption is helped greatly by the wide availability of their hardware and excellent developer support and education.

Their TPU's drive youtube video conversion and lots of other AI related stuff in Google's core business as well.

But many company's are generating their own TPU's - amazon, MS and such. It gets the work far more efficient then using a general purpose GPU.
 
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Apple can work with whomever they please and Nvidia has demonstrated to be an unpleasant business partner.

Other companies might not have a real choice in the matter but Apple has the cash book to not suffer headache partners.

Just like when they cut ZFS from its integration (in progress) in macOS upon Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

We should all learn from Apple’s management and not work with business partners that are likely to or do cause us headaches.
 
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That's must be why they're the world's most valuable company :`)

When will you people realize that business is business, and grudges are something only forum dwellers hold... there's an obvious logic behind this choice - if anything, Google's far more antagonistic to Apple than Nvidia will ever be - the hardware likely operates the same way their in-SoC model does, just on a much larger scale.
Are these people giving nGreedia money because they want to, or have to? I have heard again and again that companies do not like working with nGreedia. That hasn't changed and the list is getting longer.
 
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Are these people giving nGreedia money because they want to, or have to? I have heard again and again that companies do not like working with nGreedia. That hasn't changed and the list is getting longer.

Because they want to make money. News flash, false ethics don't speak anywhere near as loud as money.

Apple can work with whomever they please and Nvidia has demonstrated to be an unpleasant business partner.

Turns out as long as they're unpleasant business partners, they're making a killing. So who is really wrong here?
 
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Because they want to make money. News flash, false ethics don't speak anywhere near as loud as money.
Yeah, ok dude. This is a billion nGreedia didn't get then. The high end A.I. people have all but abandoned nGreedia in favour of their own chips, or somebody else's.
 
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When will you people realize that business is business
Apple didn't switch to AMD for no reason before they made their own silicon, around that time Nvidia was going around suing companies over GPU related IP and they probably recognized this as a serious liability considering what they were planning for their own hardware, they avoided a lot of trouble by ditching them in retrospect. Apple was also simply never on the same page when it came to software, they were pushing for OpenCL and Nvidia wasn't, eventually they switched to their own API seeing as OpenCL wasn't going the way they hoped.
 

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Google has pedigree in this field; they introduced dedicated AI silicon well before Nvidia, but I think adoption is hampered by the relative inaccessibility of their TPUs. Nvidia's adoption is helped greatly by the wide availability of their hardware and excellent developer support and education.

They have more than just pedigree, the current "queen of the prom" chatgpt is based on technology google published on 2017. Bard/Gemini was pretty much sitting in a drawer because google didn't think it was interesting enough. They've been investing in designing their TPUs to solve the obvious scalability and efficiency problem for longer than that. The problem with google is they are pretty bad at monetizing their own inventions and always seem like an adhd kid who easily gets distracted before finishing anything.

Are these people giving nGreedia money because they want to, or have to?

Definitely because they have to, it's the fastest way to bring something to market because of both hw availability and software support. But that will not last.

BTW this is kind of misleading, it's getting reposted everywhere but if you go read the original articles on reuters/cnbc or the paper Apple published it's not that they used Google TPUs, they used Google Cloud which offers both Google TPU and Nvidia gpus. The idea making the rounds that it's all Google silicon is just clickbait
 
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