Apple is in talks with Chinese giants Tencent and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to introduce Apple’s AI feature suite, Apple Intelligence, to iPhones in China.
As per reports, discussions are still at a very early stage. The delay in Apple Intelligence’s release in China is mostly due to ChatGPT's unavailability in the country. This has reportedly forced Apple to partner with local tech giants like Tencent and ByteDance.
Apple Intelligence was made available in October with the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1 for iPhone, iPad, and Macbook.
The latest iOS/iPadOS 18.2 and the macOS Sequoia update introduce new features for Apple Intelligence. These include the Image Playground, Genmoji, an upgrade for the Writing Tools, and Siri – which are now powered by ChatGPT.
A few weeks ago, it was also reported that Apple was facing difficulties in releasing Apple Intelligence in China, which warranted a long process of partnering with local companies. Another report said that Apple was also trying to adapt Baidu’s AI models for users in China. Notably, China is also Apple’s second-biggest market after the United States.
Recently, Apple Intelligence came under fire for sending out an incorrect notification on the iPhone regarding a BBC news report about the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. “Luigi Mangione shoots himself…” read a part of the notification.
That said, China has been investing heavily in AI. Last month, Tencent released a large 389 billion parameter open-source model, Hunyuan Large, with 52 billion active parameters. It outperforms the Llama3.1-70B model on several benchmarks in English and Chinese.
The model’s performance was also comparable with Meta’s flagship Llama 3.1-405B model on tasks involving language understanding, coding, maths and logical reasoning. A few weeks ago, Tencent also launched an open-source AI video generator, competing with OpenAI’s Sora.
Recent reports also revealed that ByteDance was the second-biggest buyer of Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs after Microsoft. This is despite the restrictions the US government imposed on NVIDIA’s selling of chips in China.
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