Unless one has lived under a rock all this while, it would have been impossible to miss Apple’s recent announcement of a significant partnership with OpenAI to integrate its advanced AI model into Siri and use ChatGPT in some of its generative AI applications.
This marks a significant milestone in the company’s AI endeavors. However, a deeper look into Apple’s technical documentation reveals another critical player in this advancement: Alphabet’s Google.
Apple’s engineers had to develop their own foundational AI models using a combination of Google’s proprietary framework software and various hardware. Notably, they have had to rely heavily on Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs), which are available only through Google’s cloud services.
Google’s TPUs, a product of nearly a decade of refinement, are highly specialized chips designed specifically to handle the intensive computational tasks required for AI training. Their unique capabilities make them a crucial component in the development of advanced AI models.
The fifth generation of these chips, which comes in different versions, boasts performance capabilities that are competitive with NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art H100 AI chips and are much easier to access if one is willing to work with Google’s cloud services.
Back in May, at Google I/O, its annual developer conference, Google announced the forthcoming release of its sixth-generation TPUs, which promises even more outstanding performance. These processors are integral to Google’s cloud computing platform, which offers specialized hardware and software to support various AI applications.
While Apple didn’t provide specific details on the extent of its use of Google’s TPUs compared to other solutions like those from NVIDIA, it’s evident that Google’s technology is a significant contributor to Apple’s AI development. This underscores the importance of cross-industry collaboration in driving technological advancements.
Using Google’s chips typically means purchasing access to the Google Cloud. This model is followed by most other companies, including Amazon’s Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s Azure.
As Apple continues to develop Siri and other AI-driven features, the underlying support from Google’s cutting-edge TPUs exemplifies how industry leaders often depend on each other’s innovations to drive progress.
