A research paper reveals that Apple used Google hardware to build the foundation for Apple Intelligence.

The paper, "Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models," details the hardware, data, and coding sources for the Apple Intelligence language models.

While most of these sources are already known, an Apple Insider report revealed that buried within the paper are citations suggesting that Apple may have used Google hardware in its early development.

According to the paper, Apple's Foundation Model (AFM) and the server technology that drives it were initially built on "v4 and v5P Cloud TPU clusters" using Apple software. However, Monday's CNBC report suggests that Apple borrowed time from an existing Google-hosted cluster.

Oddly, there is no mention of Google or Nvidia in the research paper to support this. This likely means that Apple purchased the hardware directly from the company and used it within their data center.

Apple's initial use of Google's hardware to train AI makes sense, as Google has built an efficient chip and infrastructure for AI training, including using it to train its own Gemini and Gemma family models.

Currently Apple is working on a project ACDC focused on a data center that will use hardware derived from Apple Silicone to process Apple Intelligence queries. It uses an operating system modeled after iOS, but it is not clear if this will be used only to run models in the cloud or for training future AI.

Apple is significantly increasing its investment in the field of artificial intelligence and plans to devote $5 billion to server enhancements alone over the next two years.

This is not the first time questions have been raised about the training of Apple's early generation AI models. The company was recently accused of using data from "The Pile" to train Apple Intelligence. Apple has strongly denied using Apple Intelligence for training, but has stated that it did use it to train OpenELM models. It also emphasizes that these models are not used to power Apple's commercial AI products, including Apple Intelligence.

The Pile is a dataset compiled by ElutherAI and used by many companies for AI training. However, it was discovered that much of the data was obtained without permission from YouTube video captions.

Apple may not have been an early influencer in the AI market, but the company is about to become one of the big names and may soon rival the likes of Microsoft and Meta. may have been shrouded in secrecy, but the company is taking a more open approach going forward, releasing a true open source LLM.