There are strong indications that Apple Intelligence could be about to launch in China, following its deal with Alibaba to use its Qwen models.
A local report says that Alibaba has updated its ChatGPT competitor Qwen3, which has been optimized for the AI framework used on Apple devices …
Apple can’t use ChatGPT in China
Apple partnered with OpenAI for the launch of Apple Intelligence, with fallback to ChatGPT for anything Apple’s own AI systems can’t handle.
However, ChatGPT is banned in China, and the Chinese government effectively forced Apple to partner with a Chinese AI company instead.
Apple was known to have been in discussions with a number of Chinese AI companies before Alibaba announced in February that it had won the contract.
May now be about to launch
South China Morning Post reports that the announcement of Qwen3 paves the way for launch.
Alibaba Group Holding has released its updated Qwen3 family of artificial intelligence (AI) models that could signal the potential roll-out in China of machine-learning technology on a range of Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads and MacBooks. In a Monday post on social media platform X, the Qwen team of Alibaba’s cloud computing unit said it launched open-source Qwen3 models optimised for Apple’s MLX framework for machine learning.
There had been fears the tariff war might delay the launch, but this now appears to have been resolved.
... continue reading