Apple Intelligence on M1 chips happened because of a key 2017 decision, Apple says

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Apple Intelligence is made possible by Apple’s silicon efforts as a whole, as a new interview reveals. And apparently, those efforts took a big shift all the way back in 2017 in preparation for AI.

The Circuit podcast with Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg just published a new episode featuring an interview with Apple execs Tom Boger and Tim Millet.

Their conversation focuses on Apple silicon, and covers the relationship between AI and the company’s silicon work.

We learn that the first Neural Engine was created as an extension of Apple’s computational photography ambitions, but it then set them up for success in AI.

Here’s an excerpt that relates to a 2017 decision paving the way for AI on M1 devices:

We introduced [the Neural Engine] in 2017, but another interesting thing happened in 2017, that was the paper that got published, Attention is All [You Need]. This was a paper that sort of led to the transformer networks…Well, my team was paying attention. They were reading the paper back in 2017, and they were like, holy mackerel, this stuff looks like it might be interesting. We need to make sure we can do this.

And so, we started working on re-architecting our neural engine the minute we started shipping it, so that by 2020, when we released M1 into the Apple silicon transition, we were in a position to be able to run these networks. Now, what did that mean? Well, that meant that we, as we introduced Apple Intelligence, we can commit to say, we can do that on all the Macs running Apple Silicon, because M1, we had the foresight to be able to look, and we’re paying attention to the trends and introduce it, knowing that silicon takes time to get it in there.

Apple Intelligence may not have existed in 2017, but Apple’s silicon teams making changes to the Neural Engine right away is what made it possible for 2020 Macs to run the new software today.

The full interview is available here on Apple Podcasts and is well worth a listen.

What do you think of Apple’s AI tidbits from the interview? Let us know in the comments.