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Chinese tech giant Alibaba has confirmed that its AI offerings will be integrated into Apple iPhones in mainland China.
The confirmation was made on Thursday by Alibaba Group Chairman Joe Tsai, speaking at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, CNBC reported.
It comes after the iPhone maker had unveiled Apple Intelligence in late 2024 in markets such as the United States and United Kingdom.
‘Apple Intelligence’ is the tech giant’s name for its AI move announced in June 2024, that brings OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot integration to iPads, iPhones, Vision Pro headsets and Macs, but not it seems in China.
Apple decision
″[Apple] talked to a number of companies in China, and in the end, they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones,” Alibaba’s Tsai was quoted by CNBC as saying.
The partnership was first reported by The Information, triggering a jump in Alibaba and Apple shares.
The announcement that iPhones in China will be integrated with Alibaba AI, instead of OpenAI’s technology, should provide some clarity for Apple’s strategy in China, where it faces increasingly stiff competition from local rivals.
Analysts told CNBC that Apple’s AI rollout in China had likely stalled due to China’s stringent rules on the technology.
Beijing has implemented various regulations on AI in recent years, and some of the rules require large language models to get approval for commercial use. Generative AI providers are also responsible for taking down content deemed “illegal” by Beijing.
However, Alibaba’s Tsai reportedly said Thursday that the Alibaba partnership could offer Apple a local partner to help it navigate the regulatory environment and localise its AI.
Alibaba AI
Alibaba had first showed a chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in April 2023, and said it planned to integrate the technology into all of its products in the near future.
A week later Alibaba integrated its chatbot Tongyi Qianwen into collaboration tool DingTalk.
Later in 2023 Alibaba Group chief executive Eddie Wu said the Chinese tech giant would focus on the strategic priorities of “user first” and “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven”, as the company undergoes a major restructure.
In December 2023 Alibaba research unit Damo Academy launched an AI large language model (LLM) tailored for southeast Asian languages, despite US sanctions against Chinese tech giants.
Damo said at the time that the LLM was trained on Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai, Malay, Khmer, Lao, Tagalog, and Burmese data sets and had outperformed competitors in linguistic and safety tasks.
