In a bid to challenge HUAWEI in China, Apple has been looking for a partner for its Apple Intelligence service. Among many prospects, Apple decided to pick Alibaba as its partner for its AI services. This was confirmed by Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“They talked to a number of companies in China. In the end, they chose to do business with us. They want to use our AI to power their phones. We feel extremely honored to do business with a great company like Apple,” Tsai said.
With Apple having an official partner in China through Alibaba, this should help it bring Apple Intelligence to the country and make itself competitive against the likes of HUAWEI.
Speaking of AI, Tsai shared his thoughts on it during the summit’s final day, remarking that the future of AI innovation will be driven by companies that focus on reducing training and inference costs. “What truly matters is creating specialized AI models that are economically impactful and useful in real-world scenarios,” Tsai adds.
Alibaba released its first open-model AI with Qwen-7B, which has spawned subsequent releases of 100 new Qwen2.5 models in 2024–ranging from 0.5 to 72 billion parameters—and introduced enhanced capabilities in multilingual understanding, coding, and mathematics.
