Last year, reports confirmed that Apple had picked Alibaba to power its Apple Intelligence features in China. A new report from Reuters News suggests that Apple has finalized training its China-specific LLM, which will be powered by Alibaba’s Qwen AI.
This development is noteworthy as Apple would be the first foreign company to get approval from Chinese regulators to offer a proprietary AI model in China. The China-specific Apple Intelligence features are expected to launch in the coming months with a future software update to iPhone, iPad, Mac and Vision Pro users. Earlier this week, Apple published a guide detailing how Mac users in China can connect Alibaba’s Qwen model to Siri.
The move is also a departure from Apple’s current approach to AI where it relies on third-party AI models from the likes of Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.