Apple hopes to bring its Apple Intelligence suite of AI features to China in 2025, but the company has reportedly clashed with its partner Baidu over technical and privacy issues.
Qianer Liu and Wayne Ma reporting for The Information:
Engineers from Apple and Baidu are racing to adapt Baidu’s large language models so they work well for iPhone users. But the models have struggled to understand prompts and provide accurate responses to common scenarios posed by iPhone users, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the project.
The report cites “two people familiar with the situation” who describe challenges that will need to be resolved before Apple Intelligence comes to Apple products in China.
Additionally, Baidu reportedly wants to retain data from iPhone users who make AI-powered searches, which is the polar opposite of how Apple Intelligence and Private Cloud Compute are designed. While Apple often has to make concessions to accommodate the Chinese market, compromising on user privacy for the sake of AI features is hopefully a bridge too far.
The challenge, of course, is keeping the iPhone competitive in Apple’s third largest market, as the report notes. Apple is already treating China differently than the rest of the world by partnering with Baidu. The Information reports that Apple must pay Baidu a fee for using its AI “Ernie 4.0” model and covering the expense of adapting it for the iPhone.
Baidu announced the model in October 2023. Here’s a description from a company press release at the time:
“ERNIE 4.0 has achieved a full upgrade with drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory,” Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, said at the event. “These four core capabilities form the foundation of AI-native applications and have now unleashed unlimited opportunities for new innovations.”
In his keynote, Li showcased the new ERNIE Bot powered by ERNIE 4.0 through extensive demonstrations of its four core AI capabilities. ERNIE Bot is able to “Understand” and provide answers to complex and even disorganized human requests, as well as interpreting hidden messages. ERNIE can also “Generate” a range of content, including text, images, and videos, in just a few minutes, based on one simple text prompt and image input. Li further demonstrated ERNIE Bot’s ability to “Reason” by having it solve complex geometry problems. Lastly, ERNIE Bot’s ability to “Memorize” and integrate incremental inputs was demonstrated by writing a short story and regularly adding new information as ERNIE was in process of writing the story.
Why partner with Baidu in the first place? The Information explains that while foreign AI models aren’t outright banned in China, approving these models for use isn’t a priority for the Chinese government. The Apple and Baidu partnership, which was previously reported as likely happening by the Wall Street Journal, is reported as confirmed and explained in more detail in The Information report.
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