Regarding the use of the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) for ML tasks: yes, it is closed source for direct access. However, reports indicate that it supports only for

Regarding the use of the Apple Neural Engine (ANE) for ML tasks: yes, it is closed source for direct access. However, reports indicate that it supports only forward propagation (without backward propagation) and offers a relatively limited set of supported precisions [1]. Should the API ever be opened, the ANE's primary use case would likely shift towards inference rather than training. George Hotz made pretty good progress with the ANE access ca 3 years ago at one of his videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAyw7OAcXDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAyw7OAcXDE [1] Comments from MLX (Apple-contributed Metal-only array compute library): https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/issues/18 https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/issues/18