Apple's 'Minions' runs AI inference on idle Macs

Apple researchers describe Minions, an internal system that runs AI inference jobs on idle Apple Silicon Macs when GPUs are scarce.

Why it matters: It shows a large company treating its installed base of consumer hardware as spare inference capacity, an alternative to competing for scarce data-center GPUs. That echoes Anthropic's finding on small models running on consumer devices, and suggests distributed inference could ease supply pressure.