Apple watchers will know that the company seldom, if ever, sends speakers to other people’s trade shows. So, it matters that Apple’s Senior Director of Machine Learning and AI, Benoit Dupin, took to the stage at the Amazon event. That appearance can be seen as a big endorsement both of AWS and its AI services, and the mutually beneficial relationship between Apple and AWS.
Not a new relationship.
Apple has used AWS servers for years, in part to drive its iCloud and Apple One services and to scale additional capacity at times of peak demand. “One of the unique elements of Apple’s business is the scale at which we operate, and the speed with which we innovate. AWS has been able to keep the pace,” Dupin said.
Some might note that Dupin (who once worked at AWS) threw a small curveball when he revealed that Apple has begun to deploy Amazon’s Graviton and Inferentia for machine learning services such as streaming and search. He explained that moving to these chips has generated an impressive 40% efficiency increase in Apple’s machine learning inference workloads when compared to x86 instances.