Apple has acquired Canadian synthetic intelligence startup DarwinAI, “including know-how to its arsenal forward of an enormous push into generative AI in 2024,” stories Bloomberg.
The tech large bought the enterprise earlier this yr, and dozens of DarwinAI’s staff have joined Apple’s synthetic intelligence division, the article provides, quoting “ individuals with data of the matter, who requested to not be recognized as a result of the deal hasn’t been introduced.” Alexander Wong, an AI researcher on the College of Waterloo who helped construct the enterprise, has joined Apple as a director in its AI group as a part of the deal.
DarwinAI has developed AI know-how for visually inspecting elements throughout the manufacturing course of and serves clients in a variety of industries. However one among its core applied sciences is making synthetic intelligence techniques smaller and sooner. That work that could possibly be useful to Apple, which is concentrated on operating AI on gadgets slightly than solely within the cloud, says Bloomberg.
In an October 23 Medium publish, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo stated his newest survey signifies that Apple plans to buy 2,000–3,000 and 18,000–20,000 models of synthetic intelligence (AI) servers in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
This might characterize about 1.3% and 5% of worldwide AI server shipments in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Every Nvidia HGX H100 8-GPU server (which Kuo thinks Apple will buy) is priced at round US$250,000. Due to this fact, he estimates that Apple will spend not less than about $620 million in 2023 and $4.75 billion in 2024 on AI server purchases.
From Kuo’s publish: Apple’s AI server purchases are considerably decrease in 2023 than in 2024 on account of a scarcity of Nvidia AI chips ranging from 2Q23, compounded by Apple putting its orders later than different main clients.
Nonetheless, even when the provision of Nvidia AI chips improves in 2024, Apple’s AI server purchases nonetheless lag behind its rivals. Taking Meta for instance, its AI server buy in 2024 shall be about 40,000 models. To not point out, Meta’s AI server depend earlier than 2024 already far exceeds that of Apple.
Alongside the identical traces, in an October 2023 “Energy On” publication, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman stated that “some of the intense and widespread endeavors at Apple Inc. proper now could be its effort to answer the AI frenzy sweeping the know-how trade.”
He stated that, as famous earlier than, the corporate constructed its personal giant language mannequin known as Ajax and rolled out an inner chatbot dubbed “Apple GPT” to check out the performance. The essential subsequent step is figuring out if the know-how is as much as snuff with the competitors and the way Apple will really apply it to its merchandise, in line with Gurman.
He stated that Apple’s senior vice presidents answerable for AI and software program engineering, John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, are spearheading the trouble. On Prepare dinner’s crew, they’re known as the “government sponsors” of the generative AI push.
