GuShiio.com Wen|Business Show, author| Zheng Jiuyu, Editor|Yang Xiaoruo
followingAfter DeepSeek continued to screen the screen at the beginning of the New Year, 2months11On the evening of the same day, a piece of news once again shook the entire technology circle.
According to the Financial Union quotedThe InformationIt is reported that Apple has decided to cooperate with Alibaba to build its China version of its model based on the latteriPhoneprovideApple IntelligenceServices, this cooperation has been submitted to China regulatory authorities for approval.
That is to say,The AI function of Apple’s mobile phone allowed Alibaba to contract it all.After the news broke out, Alibaba’s U.S. stocks rose more than1%, while Baidu’s share price fell by more than 10 percent4%。
What are the business considerations behind the hand-in-hand cooperation between Apple and Ali? Why did Apple give up Baidu andDeepSeekWhat?
Apple’s China AILayout Road
Since 2023, with the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology around the world, competition for AI functions in the smartphone market has become increasingly fierce.
At that time, Apple realized the huge demand and potential for AI functions in the China market, so it began to test different artificial intelligence models from well-known artificial intelligence developers in China, demonstrating that it attached great importance to AI functions in the China market.
By 2024, after a series of evaluations, Apple once chose Baidu as its main partner to jointly develop models for Apple Intelligence.
There is no doubt that as a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence in China, Baidu has accumulated deep accumulation in core technology fields such as deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision. It has a huge R & D team and rich technical achievements. Its independently developed AI models such as Wenxinyiyan also have certain influence in the industry.
Apple is mainly interested in Baidu’s technological accumulation and R & D strength in the field of artificial intelligence. The consideration behind it is that if we use Baidu’s technology, we can create a more competitive AI function for China users that is more suitable for local needs., thereby further consolidating and expanding its position in the China market.
You can think of the importance of the China market to Apple. After all, China is the second largest market outside the United States, and Apple is facing fierce competition from local brands such as Huawei and Xiaomi, and sales have experienced a significant decline.
According to data released by Singapore research firm Canalys on January 16, 2025, Apple’s mobile phone shipments in China in 2024 decreased by 17% compared with the previous year to 42.9 million units, ranking third in market share. Shipments in the smartphone market in China will increase by 4% in 2024, an increase of 12.1 million units.
Huawei accounts for a large part of Apple’s reduced market share. Data showed that Huawei increased shipments by 37% to 46 million units.
In terms of revenue share, Apple’s fiscal year 2024 (as of September 2024) data shows that Apple’s operating income was US$391 billion, an increase of 67% from US$233.7 billion in fiscal year 2015. However, Apple has only grown by 14% in Greater China, including China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and its share of Apple’s overall revenue has also dropped from 25% in 2015 to 17% in 2024.
In addition, AI functions have also become a key competitive point in the smartphone market. Some China local brands have relied on self-developed AI technology to launch smart functions that are popular among consumers. However, Apple has shortcomings in AI technology, especially in adapting to the needs of the China market, which restricts its sales growth.
In this context, Apple urgently needs to use the AI technology of local China companies to improve its experience and competitiveness.
However, this cooperation between Apple and Baidu has not progressed smoothly. according toThe InformationReported that two people with direct knowledge of the project said that the cooperation was later cancelled because Baidu’s progress in developing models for Apple’s intelligence did not meet the standards of American companies.
Although the specific progress criteria have not been publicly disclosed, judging from the cancellation of the cooperation, Baidu failed to meet Apple’s requirements in the process of developing models for Apple’s intelligence.
Some analysts said that it may be Baidu’s development speed, model performance, and functional adaptation.There are deficiencies in other aspects. From a technical perspective, it encountered some technical problems that exceeded expectations during its development process. For example, in terms of accuracy optimization of natural language processing and efficiency improvement of multimodal data fusion, the progress of overcoming was slow, which affected the performance of the overall model. improvement; In terms of communication and collaboration, because Apple and Baidu belong to different corporate cultures, there are differences in project management processes, technical standard identification, communication and coordination mechanisms, etc., resulting in untimely information transmission and smooth work connection, further delaying the development process.
This news caused quite a stir in the technology industry and also caused many speculations about Apple’s AI layout.
However, after encountering obstacles in cooperation with Baidu, Apple has been actively considering other options in recent months. Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeekThe models developed have all entered Apple’s evaluation scope.
Abandon Baidu and DeepSeek
After abandoning Baidu, Apple continued to inspect and evaluate, but also abandoned DeepSeek, which was recently popular and had absolute strength.
During the Spring Festival of 2025, DeepSeek has become the absolute focus of the technology field with its amazing momentum.
Judging from application data, DeepSeek is extremely popular. In just 20 days after its launch, the number of daily active users exceeded the 20 million mark. In just a few days, it successfully topped the download lists of Apple’s App Store in China and the United States, surpassing the ChatGPT data that has long occupied a high level for the same period.
Netizens even joked that in the past, you had to climb over walls using ChatGPT, but now foreigners have to learn Chinese and use DeepSeek!& rdquo; This phenomenal explosion has enabled DeepSeek to gain high attention on a global scale and truly achieve a gorgeous turn from obscurity to the top of the world.
The capital market also responded strongly to DeepSeek’s explosion. During the Spring Festival holiday alone, investment banks and securities firms were at full swing, holding more than 60 roadshows in 8 days, and even continued to release research reports on New Year’s Eve and the Spring Festival.
In the Hong Kong stock market, affected by the DeepSeek wave, AI concept stocks performed very well, and the stock prices of Jinshan Cloud, Fourth Paradigm, and SMIC rose sharply. On February 4, although A-shares had not yet opened, DeepSeek concept stocks had shown an early trading trend.
DeepSeek’s outstanding technical performance is also an important reason why DeepSeek is swiping the screen. Its new generation of large model R1 has strong performance, surpassing the leading open source model in many evaluations, and is indistinguishable from the world’s top closed-source model GPT-4o in terms of performance.
Shockingly, its training costs are extremely low. According to official technical papers, DeepSeek-V3 only used 2048 GPUs to train for 2 months during the pre-training phase, at a cost of only US$5.576 million, while the GPT-4o model training cost approximately US$100 million. This comparison makes the entire AI community amazed.
Not only that, DeepSeek has also continued to expand its application scenarios during the Spring Festival. Statistics show that more than 60% of users use AI to formulate travel strategies, translate foreign languages and learn local dialects.
In terms of cloud platform access, during the Spring Festival, domestic and foreign cloud platforms, including the three major operators, launched DeepSeek. In addition, large cloud platforms such as Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Intelligent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, and Tencent Cloud, as well as many overseas technology manufacturers such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Nvidia, have also announced access to the DeepSeek model.
Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, has also become the focus of attention this Spring Festival, and his every move has attracted public attention. Liang Wenfeng’s hometown of Mililing Village, Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, put up banners and erected arches everywhere to welcome this technology hero back to his hometown.
Even so,Apple finally gave up DeepSeek, which had recently been highly praised.
The InformationThe report mentioned that the reason behind this was that DeepSeek’s team lacked the manpower and experience needed to support major customers like Apple.By the evening of February 11, news of Apple Lozi Ali spreadOut.
However, in contrast, Alibaba has indeed demonstrated its unique advantages in cooperating with Apple in many aspects.First of all, as an e-commerce giant, Alibaba has a large amount of personal data of China consumers, covering multi-dimensional information such as users ‘shopping preferences, payment habits, and consumption behaviors.
These data are relevantAIUnderstanding the needs and behavioral patterns of China users is crucialImportant, can makeAIProvide users with more personalized and accurate services. For example, by analyzing users ‘shopping history,AIYou can recommend products to users that suit their tastes, or provide more relevant results when users search.
Secondly, Alibaba has a huge and complete ecosystem covering e-commerce, finance, logistics, cloud computing and other fields. This allows the cooperation between Apple and Ali to achieve coordinated development in multiple fields and expandAIApplication scenarios of functions.
For example, in the field of commerce,AIIt can help users find their favorite products more quickly; in the financial field,AICan provide smart financial advice and risk assessment; in the logistics field,AIDistribution routes can be optimized and distribution efficiency can be improved. This ecological synergy can bring users a more comprehensive and convenient service experience, and also inject new vitality into Apple’s development in the China market.
In addition, Alibaba has made a series of technological breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and other fields. in 20241months29On the day, Ali releasedQwen 2.5 MaxThe model has demonstrated highly competitive results in multiple benchmark tests, which also proves that Alibaba is inAITechnical strength provides technical guarantee for cooperation with Apple.
A win-win situation in the AI industry”
After some in-depth investigation, Apple finally landed in Ali. Currently, Apple and Ali have submitted the jointly developed AI functions to regulatory agencies for approval.
Undoubtedly, this hand-holding is of great significance to many parties.For Apple, in the face of the dilemma of declining sales in the China market in recent years, this is an important measure to recover its decline in the China market.
Since May 2024, Huawei and others have added generative AI functions to some flagship models, further exacerbating Apple’s competitive pressure in the China market.The AI features developed in cooperation with Ali will add unique selling points to the China version of the iPhone and help Apple regain market share.
At the same time, with the help of Ali’s data and ecological advantages, Apple can better understand the needs of China users, achieve localized innovation of products, and further deepen the China market.
This is also a major opportunity for Alibaba.
As a China e-commerce giant, Alibaba has unique advantages in data resources. It has a large amount of personal data of China consumers, and it has developed a large-scale language model that is connected to Yiqian, which has achieved remarkable results in the field of natural language processing. The cooperation with Apple is a recognition of its technical strength and opens up a new path for the commercial application of its AI technology.
By cooperating with world-renowned brands like Apple, Alibaba can enhance its influence in the global technology field, expand business boundaries, and accelerate the application and promotion of AI technology in more fields. In addition, cooperation may also bring more business opportunities to Ali in cloud computing, data services and other aspects.
From the perspective of the entire industry and market, the cooperation between Apple and Ali will intensify competition in the AI market and promote the rapid development of industry technology. Other technology companies may increase their investment in AI and launch more competitive products and services to meet challenges from Apple and Alibaba. This will promote continuous innovation in the entire AI industry and bring more high-quality AI applications to consumers.
Boosted by this news, U.S. stocks of the two companies rose more than 3% on the day the news came out.
In short, the cooperation between Apple and Ali is a strategic choice based on business logic and market demand. Behind it is comprehensive considerations of technical strength, data resources, service capabilities and other aspects.
This cooperation will not only change Apple’s competitive landscape in the China market, but will also bring new opportunities to Alibaba’s development. It will also have a profound impact on the entire AI industry.
We also look forward to the early implementation of the cooperation between the two parties to bring a smarter and more convenient experience to users.“End”
