Apple Intelligence isn’t available in China yet
Apple’s push to bring Apple Intelligence to China has taken a big step forward, with it working with Alibaba to produce AI features for the country’s iPhone users.
Apple is in the middle of a slow rollout of Apple Intelligence to its iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, with it currently only available in a small number of English-speaking countries. There is the intention to bring it to China among other territories, but regulatory issues have been the stumbling block so far.
To operate in China, Apple has to abide by the country’s regulatory rules concerning AI models. While it is a difficult prospect to do so by itself, the easier path is to partner with a tech company in the country working on AI, which can quickly be turned into a regional and regulation-meeting version of Apple Intelligence.
According to The Information on Tuesday, Apple is working with tech giant Alibaba on its Apple Intelligence effort. A person familiar with the work says that the two companies have submitted the co-developed AI features for regulatory approval, with the hope that they can be brought to iPhones in a future iOS update.
Doing so could help boost sales in China, with Apple still recovering from a tumble in shipments in 2024.
Multiple failed attempts
Apple’s trials to get Apple Intelligence into China have involved many failed relationships, until it struck gold with Alibaba.
In December, a deal between Apple and Baidu was reportedly faltering, due to technical and philosophical privacy issues. Baidu’s LLMs had failed to provide adequate responses to typical iPhone user questions.
Baidu reportedly wanted more access to user data to improve results, but Apple didn’t allow that to happen.
In the wake of that failure, Apple started looking for other partnerships. Within the same month, it apparently talked to Tencent and ByteDance, owner of TikTok, to use their AI models for the same task.
Evidently, they weren’t good enough, and Apple went with Alibaba.
A better match
Apple’s decision to go with Alibaba may have been due to the company’s existing trove of personal data, created from its massive e-commerce business. The report source said that the personalized data set would be usable for model training, with a view to providing more customized services to Chinese users.
The timing of the partnership is apt for Apple, as it has a self-imposed deadline of an Apple Intelligence launch in simplified Chinese in April, for users outside of China. A release in China would still require regulatory approval, but the creation of a Chinese version would be a good step towards that inside-China launch.
