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Comment by peppertree | Hacker News Reader

I think the biggest announcement was the private compute cloud with Apple Silicon. Apple is building up internal expertise to go after Nvidia.

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Can you explain what that means for someone who missed part of the video today?

The Apple Intelligence cloud system uses Apple's own M-series chips, not Nvidia.

Because they will be running inference using much smaller models than GPT 4.

At least they are honest about it in the specs that they have published - there's a graph there that clearly shows their server-side model underperforming GPT-4. A refreshing change from the usual "we trained a 7B model and it's almost as good as GPT-4 in tests" hype train.

(see "Apple Foundation Model Human Evaluation" here: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...)

Yea, their models are more targeted. You can't ask Apple Intelligence/Siri about random celebrities or cocktail recipes.

But you CAN ask it to show you all pictures you took of your kids during your vacation to Cabo in 2023 and it'll find them for you.

The model "underperforms", but not in the ways that matter. This is why they partnered with OpenAI, to get the generic stuff included when people need it.

Isn't it also that Nvidia chips are basically unobtainable right now anyway?

Yeah, but Apple wouldn’t care either way. They do things for the principle of it. “We have an ongoing beef with NVIDIA so we’ll build our own ai server farms.”

Apple have a long antagonist relationship with NVIDIA. If anything it is holding Apple back because they don’t want to go cap in hand to NVIDIA and say “please sir, can I have some more”.

We see this play out with the ChatGPT integration. Rather than hosting GPT-4o themselves, OpenAI are. Apple is providing NVIDIA powered AI models through a third party, somewhat undermining the privacy first argument.

Rumours say that Apple has bought a lot of GPUs from Nvidia in the last year or so in order to train their own models.

Not really. They use ChatGPT as a last resort for a question that isn't related to the device or an Apple-related interaction. Ex: "Make a recipe out of the foods in this image" versus "how far away is my mom from the lunch spot she told me about". And in that instance they ask the user explicitly whether they want to use ChatGPT.

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