Apple Reportedly 'Passed Over' DeepSeek as Apple Intelligence Partner
Apple in recent months "passed over" the Chinese artificial intelligence company DeepSeek, according to The Information.
DeepSeek has garnered significant media attention over the past few weeks, as it developed an artificial intelligence model at a lower cost and with reduced power consumption compared to competitors. However, the U.S. and some other countries have moved to ban DeepSeek on government devices due to privacy concerns.
Apple is required to work with a local Chinese company to develop artificial intelligence models for devices sold in China. The report said Apple had targeted Baidu as its partner last year, but Apple eventually decided that Baidu did not meet its standards, leading it to assess models from other companies in recent months.
The report said Apple has assessed models developed by Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, and it appears to be moving forward on a partnership with Alibaba at this time. Apple and Alibaba have submitted a first set of artificial intelligence features that they co-developed to China's cyberspace regulator for approval, the report said.
Apple Intelligence will gain support for additional languages this year, including Chinese, according to Apple. The next set of new languages are coming in an April software update. However, this Chinese language support might be limited to countries outside of China until if and when Apple Intelligence is approved to launch there.
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