Apple Partners With Alibaba to Bring iPhone AI Features to China

[MacRumors]

Apple will partner with Alibaba to offer AI features in China, the Chinese company's chairman said on Thursday, resolving months of speculation around Apple's strategy in the region.

"They talked to a number of companies in China," said Joe Tsai at the World Government Summit in Dubai. "In the end they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones. We feel extremely honoured to do business with a great company like Apple."

Alibaba stocks surged as much as 8.6% on a report by The Information that Apple is working with the e-commerce giant to roll out AI features in China. Apple has not yet rolled out its full suite of AI features in the country because of regulations that require it to partner with a local company.

Apple devices outside of the country use a combination of proprietary Apple Intelligence and OpenAI's ChatGPT to provide AI features. The Information reports that both Alibaba and Apple have already submitted materials to authorities for approval.

Today's development follows news earlier in the week that Apple "passed over" the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which recently made waves in the industry for being developed at a significantly lower cost than rivals. Today's report says that Apple initially considered Baidu as its primary AI partner last year, but its AI models did not meet Apple's requirements.

The AI partnership comes at a crucial time for Apple, which faced a significant setback in China in 2024, relinquishing its position as the country's top smartphone vendor. According to market research firm Canalys, Apple's annual shipments in the country declined by 17%, creating an opportunity for domestic manufacturer Vivo to take the lead.

Article Link: Apple Partners With Alibaba to Bring iPhone AI Features to China

 

[JohnRckr]

Not like they got offer much anyway..
If sales in China were already bad, half-baked 3 years behind competition AI gimmick won’t raise the numbers.

 

[Col4bin]

What AI features? You mean all the marketing smoke and mirrors?

 

[DelayedGratificationGene]

Nice Apple. Alibaba is the best choice. China market waiting for this.

 

[Sheepish-Lord]

Alibaba is definitely where Apple's AI belongs, yikes

 

[JapanApple]

All Companies to partner with AliBaba?

 

[mxrider88]

Forced to rely on third parties because they were sleeping while the whole planet moved forward with generative AI. Too busy releasing features for kids and emojis, with developers that can't write ten lines of code bug free. Wow how far they came.

 

[Realityck]

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/13/apple-will-integrate-alibabas-ai-into-iphones-in-china-chairman-joe-tsai-says.html

Alibaba is among China’s technology giants that have built their own large language models and voice assistant’s

Sounds like both can reinforce each other

 

[JohnRckr]

Forced to rely on third parties because they were sleeping while the whole planet moved forward with generative AI. Too busy releasing features for kids and emojis, with developers that can't write ten lines of code bug free. Wow how far they came.

and we will pay premium for it

 

[FridgeToaster]

Not necessarily a bad thing. Apple Map has been using a local data provider (Amap) in China since the beginning of its launch. The user experience was way better when it got criticized in the US back in the days.

 

[thefrost]

Not like anyone will use the features anyway.

 

[adrianjagielak]

Alibaba Intelligence

 

[WarmWinterHat]

Ignore Apple AI here or ignore it there. What's the difference?

 

[Madhatter32]

Alibaba/Apple makes sense. Jack Ma was the Chinese Steve Jobs after all. RIP Steve Jobs. RIP Jack Ma.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Forced to rely on third parties because they were sleeping while the whole planet moved forward with generative AI. Too busy releasing features for kids and emojis, with developers that can't write ten lines of code bug free. Wow how far they came.

But at the same time, Apple didn’t have to dump huge amounts of money into GPU farms to train and run their own LLMs, especially now that Deepseek and others have shown that potentially more efficient methods exists. While there are some small performance differences between different models, by and large there are no big functional difference for consumers. Apple seems to be treating companies that train models as more of a parts supplier/utility and adds their own features on top, which could be smarter in the long run since they can mix and match depending on what works best (and create their own smaller models on the side for less intensive tasks).

 

[macfacts]

What AI features? You mean all the marketing smoke and mirrors?

Apple gave up trying to make an electric self driving car when Xiaomi was able to make an electric car. And byd has a low cost (under $9 k usd) self driving electric car, when Tesla charges over $9 k for the self driving feature.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Apple gave up trying to make an electric self driving car when Xiaomi was able to make an electric car. And byd has a low cost (under $9 k usd) self driving electric car, when Tesla charges over $9 k for the self driving feature.

Not sure what you’re trying to say here. There is very little value Apple can add that can differentiate an Apple car from the competition other than better infotainment (which we’re already getting via CarPlay anyways) based on the tech that we have currently. Full self driving that functions at an acceptable enough level to hand over control completely is still years away from being ready both technologically and legislatively. Hardware-wise Apple will also have to rely on Chinese manufacturers and suppliers since that’s not where their expertise is. It was the right business decision to back out of that market, especially given the tariffs that were approaching.

 

[Howard2k]

Full self driving that functions at an acceptable enough level to hand over control completely is still years away from being ready both technologically and legislatively.

When you say "years away" you mean this year.

 

[WarmWinterHat]

When you say "years away" you mean this year.

...in nice weather, on well-marked roads in sunny dry cities, without snow, ice or sensor-blinding rain.

 

[szw-mapple fan]

When you say "years away" you mean this year.

Even Tesla’s best full self driving betas still requires human interventions from time to time and there are barely any states where it’s legal to use full self driving cars without a license. Until it’s legalized it’ll remain an extra fancy driving assist feature.

 

[W£S]

Even Tesla’s best full self driving betas still requires human interventions from time to time and there are barely any states where it’s legal to use full self driving cars without a license. Until it’s legalized it’ll remain an extra fancy driving assist feature.

Check out the BYD’s God’s Eyes series. They just launched 21 models with self driving features, with the cheapest around the cost of Tesla’s FSD. Unfortunately this is currently only available in China. Looking at the YouTube videos, it is very impressive and I will snatch one if they start selling these models in my country 💸

 

[szw-mapple fan]

Check out the BYD’s God’s Eyes series. They just launched 21 models with self driving features, with the cheapest around the cost of Tesla’s FSD. Unfortunately this is currently only available in China. Looking at the YouTube videos, it is very impressive and I will snatch one if they start selling these models in my country 💸

I have no doubt that these cars have impressive self driving and would be a lot more relaxing to drive than non fsd cars, but functionally you still need a driver to be responsible for the car and be there to take over when there’s the rare issue. Until we reach a stage where both the tech and legal framework allows us to ride without a driver present, I feel like there wouldn’t be any fundamental change to the car experience.

 

[t0rqx]

Is it called Apple Intelligence or Alibaba Inteligence?

 

[Howard2k]

Even Tesla’s best full self driving betas still requires human interventions from time to time and there are barely any states where it’s legal to use full self driving cars without a license. Until it’s legalized it’ll remain an extra fancy driving assist feature.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-plans-unsupervised-full-self-210146191.html

Tesla (TSLA, Financials) aims to introduce unsupervised Full Self-Driving in Austin by June 2025, with an expansion across the U.S. by the end of the year, Chief Executive Elon Musk said during the company's fourth-quarter earnings call.

 

[coolfactor]

What AI features? You mean all the marketing smoke and mirrors?

Are you suggesting that we don't yet have AI in operation? That's true, but also not. Do we have true "Artificial Intelligence" in its truest form, true sentience? No. But we're darn close.

But we do have "intelligence" in varying degrees now. The ability for a machine to analyze a request, understand the intent, seek an answer from a knowledge-base (memory), and then compose a response — in whatever form — is pretty much an artificial reproduction of brain processes.

Just because a 4-year old child can't do quadratic equations doesn't mean that child isn't intelligent. We're in the "infancy" stage of AI right now. It will keep improving/growing.

Apple was brilliant to name their system "Apple Intelligence" because they can sidestep the "artificial" nuances while still offering access to the growing body of AI-scoped features. Their "extension" approach is also brilliant in that they can bring in 3rd-party services on a per-choice basis. Let's hope this Alibaba implementation is being done via that mechanism.