How Apple Makes the AI Chip Powering the iPhone's Fancy Tricks

A few years ago--the company won't say exactly when--some engineers at Apple began to think the iPhone's camera could be made smarter using newly powerful machine learning algorithms known as neural networks. Before long, they were talking with a lean vice president named Tim Millet. Millet leads a team of chip architects, who got to work. When the iPhone X was unveiled last fall, Apple's camera team had added a slick new portrait mode that can digitally adjust the lighting on subjects' faces, and artfully blur the background. It took advantage of a new module added to the iPhone's main chip called the neural engine, customized to run machine learning code.