Report: Apple Struggling to Adapt Apple Intelligence for China

Apple is struggling to work with Chinese tech company Baidu to bring Apple Intelligence to China next year, The Information reports.

While it is now available in the United States and several other regions, ‌Apple Intelligence‌ is not available in China due to the country's restrictive security, privacy, and content obligations, which demands that any public AI technology obtains regulatory approval. This led Apple to partner directly with Baidu, a Chinese company, to deliver ‌Apple Intelligence‌ features in the country expediently.

Citing two individuals said to be familiar with the situation, the report claims that Apple and Baidu are racing to adapt the latter's most advanced large language model, Ernie 4.0, to work well for iPhone users both via the cloud and on-device. Apparently, the models have had difficulty understanding prompts and providing accurate responses to common scenarios.

While Baidu wants results to be driven by data used to train its model, Apple wants it to provide a more personalized answer based on a user's iPhone usage. Likewise, the two companies have clashed over the use of iPhone user data to train and improve the AI models. Baidu reportedly wants to save and analyze data from iPhone users, but this is forbidden under Apple's privacy commitments.

The issues are particularly notable since Apple hopes to use ‌Apple Intelligence‌ to rejuvenate iPhone sales in China, where revenue has declined for three consecutive years due to heightened competition from local smartphone brands such as Huawei that tout a wide array of AI features.

Unlike its collaboration with OpenAI, which reportedly comes at no cost to either company, Apple is actively paying Baidu a fee to use its AI models and has agreed to cover computing costs. Apple already uses Baidu for default search results in Safari and Siri.

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