According to MacRumors, Apple artificial intelligence (AI) researchers say they’ve made a key breakthrough in deploying large language models (LLMs) on iPhones and other Apple devices with limited memory by inventing an innovative flash memory utilization technique.

In a new research paper titled “LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory,” the Apple researchers says their “work not only provides a solution to a current computational bottleneck but also sets a precedent for future research.”

The New York Times reported in March that Apple is testing AI features (think ChatGPT) that could eventually come to Siri, the company’s “virtual digital assistant.”

Apple engineers, including members of the ‌Siri‌ team, have reportedly been testing language-generation concepts “every week” in response to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, the article adds. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques

In a Medium post in October analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said his latest survey indicates that Apple plans to purchase 2,000–3,000 and 18,000–20,000 units of artificial intelligence (AI) servers in 2023 and 2024, respectively. 

This would represent about 1.3% and 5% of worldwide AI server shipments in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Each Nvidia HGX H100 8-GPU server (which Kuo thinks Apple will purchase) is priced at around US$250,000. Therefore, he estimates that Apple will spend at least about $620 million in 2023 and $4.75 billion in 2024 on AI server purchases.

Also in October, in a Power On” newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said that “one of the most intense and widespread endeavors at Apple Inc. right now is its effort to respond to the AI frenzy sweeping the technology industry.”

He said that the company built its own large language model called Ajax and rolled out an internal chatbot dubbed “Apple GPT” to test out the functionality. The critical next step is determining if the technology is up to snuff with the competition and how Apple will actually apply it to its products, according to Gurman.



Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today