Apple partnered with the Chinese technology giant Alibaba to bring advanced AI features to the iPhone and other devices, similar to how it uses OpenAI's ChatGPT alongside Apple Intelligence. The company was also in talks with Baidu to power Apple Intelligence, but the two have settled for iPhone's Visual Intelligence.
However, the Cupertino giant must adhere to the censorship laws on Chinese soil. A new report from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman details how Apple Intelligence will work in China, noting that Alibaba will modify and censor content on Apple's on-device models to make peace with Chinese laws.
"In other words, Apple isn’t working with Alibaba to run its AI models. Alibaba is instead the censorship layer for China, per local laws, on top of Apple’s own models," Gurman wrote in a social media post, adding that Baidu serves as the outside partner to run services like Visual Intelligence.
The partnership will allow the Chinese government to request changes through Alibaba whenever it wants to tweak or restrict the information provided to the users. Further, Chinese law requires cloud data to be stored and processed locally.
Apple uses the Private Cloud Compute to handle complex AI workloads, and the company may implement a local infrastructure similar to how it handles iCloud data on servers operated by state affiliate GCBD.
Apple is working to bring its AI suite to China by the middle of this year. It's expected to push an update around May to turn on Apple Intelligence features on its devices in China. One thing to note is that the Chinese censored version of Apple Intelligence will only be available on devices sold in China.
Apple Intelligence was introduced last year with the iOS 18 update, and the company is baking more features into it over subsequent updates. Apple will add support for more languages, including Chinese, English (India), English (Singapore), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
On a side note, if Apple Intelligence isn't your cup of tea, you can claim up to 7GB of storage space on your iPhone by disabling it.
Source: Bloomberg via 9to5Google
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