Apple is currently in discussions with Chinese tech giants Tencent and ByteDance to bring its AI feature suite, Apple Intelligence, to iPhones in China. According to reports, these talks are still in the early stages. The delay in the release of Apple Intelligence in China is mainly due to the unavailability of ChatGPT, a key component of the feature, in the country. This has led Apple to partner with local companies like Tencent and ByteDance. Apple Intelligence was first introduced in October with the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS 15.1 for iPhone, iPad, and Macbook. The latest updates, iOS/iPadOS 18.2 and macOS Sequoia, bring new features to Apple Intelligence, including Image Playground, Genmoji, an upgraded Writing Tools, and Siri, all powered by ChatGPT. It was reported a few weeks ago that Apple was facing challenges in launching Apple Intelligence in China, which required a lengthy process of partnering with local companies. Another report stated that Apple was also working on adapting Baidu’s AI models for Chinese users. China is a crucial market for Apple, being its second-largest market after the United States. However, Apple Intelligence recently faced criticism for sending out an incorrect notification on iPhones regarding the arrest of Luigi Mangione, the lead suspect in the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. China has been heavily investing in AI, with Tencent releasing a large open-source model, Hunyuan Large, with 389 billion parameters and 52 billion active parameters. This model outperforms the Llama3.1-70B model on various benchmarks in both English and Chinese. It also performs comparably to Meta’s flagship Llama 3.1-405B model on tasks involving language understanding, coding, maths, and logical reasoning. Tencent also recently launched an open-source AI video generator, competing with OpenAI’s Sora. Reports have also revealed that ByteDance was the second-largest buyer of Nvidia’s Hopper GPUs, despite the US government’s restrictions on the sale of chips to China. With these developments, it is clear that China is a key player in the AI space, and the launch of Apple Intelligence in the country is highly anticipated.
