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Apple has shared details on a collaboration with NVIDIA to greatly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) by implementing a new text generation technique that offers substantial speed improvements for AI applications.

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Apple earlier this year published and open-sourced Recurrent Drafter (ReDrafter), an approach that combines beam search and dynamic tree attention methods to accelerate text generation. Beam search explores multiple potential text sequences at once for better results, while tree attention organizes and removes redundant overlaps among these sequences to improve efficiency.

Apple has now integrated the technology into NVIDIA's TensorRT-LLM framework, which optimizes LLMs running on NVIDIA GPUs, where it achieved "state of the art performance," according to Apple. The integration saw the technique manage a 2.7x speed increase in tokens generated per second during testing with a production model containing tens of billions of parameters.

Apple says the improved performance not only reduces user-perceived latency but also leads to decreased GPU usage and power consumption. From Apple's Machine Learning Research blog:
"LLMs are increasingly being used to power production applications, and improving inference efficiency can both impact computational costs and reduce latency for users. With ReDrafter's novel approach to speculative decoding integrated into the NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM framework, developers can now benefit from faster token generation on NVIDIA GPUs for their production LLM applications."

Developers interested in implementing ReDrafter can find detailed information on both Apple's website and NVIDIA's developer blog.

Article Link: Apple Teams Up With NVIDIA to Speed Up AI Language Models
 
Not just Apple and Nvidia teaming up again - but on a product Apple won't sell and based on software Apple has opensourced!

In the long term this is only going to help consumers and businesses who want to run offline LLMs at home (on Nvidia hardware)
 
Apple is in triage mode over Siri!! Yes everyone knows how bad Siri is!! All AI LLM is far from perfect but so far I would rather deal with with any AI/LLM engine rather than Siri. I have an android phone with Google’s Gemini which is a far from perfect but I find myself using it 90% of the time over Siri. If my life depended on it I would avoid Siri at all costs. I would rather seek help from an alcoholic meth head with dementia rather than trust Siri. For heavens sakes she still can’t even dial a phone number or route me to the correct address with a greater than ~90% success rate.
 
NVIDIA and Apple??!!? Working together again?

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True. I still remember that I bought the last 13” MacBook Pro (2010) with an “integrated” Nvidia graphics chip, the GeForce 320M, which performance remained strong for several generations (if I recall correctly, the Intel HD graphics 3000 wasn’t as powerful).

Born with Snow Leopard, with each new iteration of OSX first, and macOS later, it ran better each year (replacing the HD for an SSD during the Yosemite era, which gave it a second life).

Was sold running its last supported operating system: macOS High Sierra. It was a great machine! My first Mac.
 
What would be an even better collaboration would be Apple enabling Nvidia GPU options again—at least for the Mac Pro.

It would be AWESOME to be able to use Nvidia’s ray-tracing and tensor cores with my creative professional and AI problems with Titan-class/Prosumer/workstation GPUs (x90 and up) again without having to switch to my PC.

A Nvidia MPX GPU module as capable as a 5090 with no wires and Thunderbolt 5 support would be a nirvana-like outcome—especially if Microsoft, Apple, and/or Valve enables a way to dual boot to Windows on ARM and SteamOS.

While I love building a liquid-cooled PC, I and various prosumers would finally have a choice to stop buying PCs altogether
 
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Since Apple now produces its own GPUs there is no need for hell to freeze over. Do you even remember the reason Apple and Nvidia parted ways? It was over Nvidia wanting complete access to macOS’s core. Apple said no way.
And, we’ve since had a REALLY good example (CrowdStrike) of why this would have been a baaaad idea.
 
NVidia? Did hell freeze over again?
Don't misconstrue testing AI for partnership and future GPGPUs. That is not Apple's intention. They'll be testing against AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, Google, etc. They aren't partnering with them for gear you and I or anyone else will see. It's about bullet proofing AI on macOS, iOS, tvOS, iPadOS, visionOS to be transparent and test their own algorithms.

No eGPU, etc.
 
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