“A year ago, when they talked about Apple Intelligence, he struck me how they were doing a” above all “, right? They had their things but they could fall on chatgpt”, says Ben Lee, professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the department of electricity engineering and systems, who had previously consulted destination and Google on sustainability.
“This suggests that they are not sure that the smaller models give them what they want on the device,” he says. “I think they are trying to develop the ability first and then he is trying to understand the efficiency later.”
The path for the development of functionality to the most advanced was not exactly smooth, with the painful key characteristics delayed And the next generation Siri has pushed further and back, with the update now not expected until the spring of 2026. Bloomberg reporting He suggests that Apple’s leadership is placing a transition to Openi or anthropic technology to finally help to provide his promises of artificial intelligence for a new version of Siri, with tests of these external models on Apple’s cloud infrastructure. The question is: Lisa Jackson, vice president of Apple for the environment, politics and social initiatives, will it be at that table when these decisions are made?
Even if it is, it cannot be moved away from the electricity necessary to produce the chips at advanced semiconductors that feed Apple intelligence on the device (such as the A18 and A18 Pro chips) and the Apple servers (According to reports Apple Schip M4 starting this year). “Taiwan does not have such a rapid deployment of renewable energy and South Korea, another place that factory a lot of chips, does not have much,” says Lee.
In March, TSMC-the semiconductor chipmaker based in Taiwan that feeds the figures of the figure Report 2024, including a section on ESG: There was a 19 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions per unit of product compared to its goal of 10 percent diminish. There was also a 14 % increase in water consumption and, Drumroll please, only about 14 percent of its used energy came from renewable energies.
The TSMC print team, when asked for a comment, indicated TSMC Accelerate its temporal sequence of renewable energy Within 10 years in 2023, a 20-year-old joint supply agreement for 20,000 gigawatts of renewable energy and its partnership with Apple on the Restore the fund for carbon removal projects.
But Lena Chang of Greenpeace wants to see TSMC invest more in the winds of the wind, sun and geothermal energy of Taiwan, following Google’s advantage there. “Most TSMC renewable energies are purchased,” he says. “They can take the initiative to invest more. From a passive consumer to a proactive prosumer, this is what we are trying to call TSMC to do more.”
An afterlife for iPhone
Of course, one of the most difficult threads to solve in all this is the incompatibility of the construction of shavings capable of AI for iPhone which are used on average for only two and a half years before a customer updates to a new device.
“Unlike the data centers, who buy hardware and therefore distribute for a very long life and get a very high use, do not get it from the side of consumption electronics,” says Lee. “Apple would like us to update our hardware every two years about two years. So this is the difficulty. You have the numbers of flow emissions 3 [for the supply chain]So very high update speed and relatively low use. “
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