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Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud (arstechnica.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

Wouldn't this absolutely hammer the battery though, or at least give the CPU a hard time? My understanding is that offloading the work to a cloud platform means that the processor-intensive inputting, parsing, generating, and outputting operations are done in purpose-built datacentres, and end user devices just receive the prepared answer.

Wouldn't this rinse the battery and increase the overall device temperature for "normal" end users?

Fair warning: I haven't read the two papers outlined in the article.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    CPUs can have special hardware accelerators for stuff like this, and you'd be surprised how powerful our little phone CPUs are and how optimized stuff like this can become.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Awesome, thanks for the insight.

    I'm showing my age here, but much like we had math coprocessors running beside the 286 and 386 gen CPUs to take on floating point operations; then graphics cards offloaded geometry-based math operations to GPU's - are we looking at AI-style die or chips to specifically work on AI functions?

    Excuse my oversimplification, this isn't my field of expertise!

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Apple added (a while back) what they call a “Neural Engine,” which is hardware dedicated to efficient execution of ML workloads.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A11

    They have been refining it ever since. I would not be surprised if they made advancements in both the hardware and software used for local GAI.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    They already have dedicated hardware they call the neural engine, and use for coreML, ARKit, some of the magic they do to turn terrible sensors and lenses into passable images, etc. There's a lot of processing that already happens on your device. Being able to search your images by subject might be something Google does too, but Apple does it locally.

    So my guess is they'll just adjust the architecture of the neural engine to accommodate any new requirements, rather than adding a "new core". But it's kind of all semantics. There will be new hardware components and intercommunication at a low level.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago*

    Yup, technology and especially phones have come a disgustingly long way in such a short amount of time. Running AI efficiently on them is the next step, one that we probably won't struggle with too much.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago

    Apple already does a lot of this stuff. For example, it'll do offline face recognition for your photos while your phone is charging overnight.

    Plus, Apple is ahead of the curve when it comes to performance on this stuff. You don't want to be running Stable Diffusion on your iPhone, but smaller AI is perfectly fine. Plus, unlike on Android, there are huge amounts of devices with ML accelerator chips that can run these models efficiently, allowing for power consumption optimisations by not having to provide a CPU fallback.

    We'll have to see how effective this will be in practice, but Apple generally doesn't bring these types of features to their newer devices until they're ready for daily use.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    It’s a technical challenge but I wouldn’t rule it out. Apple has been using a “neural engine” in their SoC for faced id, etc. for a while. So it’s something they’ve been working on. It will need to get better, but AI models are also getting more efficient.

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