GuShiio.com Article source: Titanium Media AGI
Image source: Generated by AI
After many rounds of screening, Apple seems to have finally settled on a partner for Apple Intelligence.
Titanium Media AGI reported on February 11 that Apple has reached a cooperation with Alibaba Group to jointly develop AI functions for the China market. At present, the AI functions jointly developed by both parties have been submitted for approval.
Reported that this is Apple’s software upgrade strategy to reverse the continued decline in sales in China. Apple earlier stated that it will launch the simplified Chinese version of Apple Intelligence to users outside China in April this year, but launch in China requires approval, and the Bank of China AI developer tutorial will be announced on March 25.
Neither Apple nor Ali commented on this news.
This is good news for both Apple and Ali. Affected by this news, Alimei shares (NASDAQ: BABA) once surged nearly 2%, but are now up about 1.1%; Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) shares rose nearly 1%.
Since the beginning of 2025, affected by multiple news such as DeepSeek and Apple AI, Alibaba’s share price has risen by 32.54%, exceeding market expectations.
According to reports,In 2023, Apple began rolling out multilingual AI features on devices such as the iPhone in the United States and other countries. Apple calls it Apple Intelligence, which uses Apple’s own AI model and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to process user requests. These features include improving the iPhone’s photo search, notification and text rewriting capabilities.
However, in China, last year Apple began to try to cooperate with Baidu to develop model applications for Apple Intelligence, but the progress did not meet Apple standards, so cooperation encountered obstacles.People familiar with the matter said that Apple has begun to consider other options in recent months, evaluating models developed by Tencent, ByteDance, Alibaba and DeepSeek.
However, reports pointed out that Apple eventually abandoned DeepSeek’s model because the DeepSeek team lacked the manpower and experience needed to support major customers like Apple.
Since the beginning of this year, Apple has begun to accelerate the deployment of AI models for iPhone National Bank devices, mainly in the face of strong competition from domestic brands such as Huawei and vivo. Apple’s sales in China in 2023 have declined for two consecutive years.
The latest financial report shows that in fiscal year 2024, Apple’s revenue in Greater China fell by 7.7% year-on-year, with a decline of 11% in the fourth quarter. Apple CEO Tim Cook admitted at the earnings conference that the iPhone’s lack of AI features was an important reason.
According to Counterpoint’s monthly mobile phone sales report, Huawei ranked first in the domestic market share in the fourth quarter of 2024, followed by Xiaomi, Apple, vivo and Glory. Huawei sales rose 15.5% year-on-year, Xiaomi increased 3.9% year-on-year, while Apple fell 18.2%.
Cook said of DeepSeek that overall,”innovation that drives efficiency is a good thing.”Apple management also said that Apple has spared no effort in AI by closely integrating chips and software to provide AI services.
When talking about Apple’s AI strategy, Cook said: “From a capital expenditure perspective, we have always taken a very prudent and prudent attitude towards spending, and we will continue to use the hybrid model, which I think will continue to work.”
Ali has long laid out AI big model technology, and will launch Tongyi Qianwen Qwen big language model technology and Tongyi App products in 2023.
As an AI and cloud computing service provider that provides 80% of the country’s technology companies and more than half of the AI big model companies, Alibaba Cloud not only provides Tongyi big models, but also continues to establish a security architecture. In the past year, the price of Alibaba’s “Tongyi Thousand Questions” API calls has dropped by 97% in a year, and more than 300,000 companies in China such as FAW, Lenovo, and Weibo have connected to the Tongyi model.
At the open source level, in the Hugging Face community, there are currently more than 80,000 derivative models developed by global developers based on Ali’s self-developed “Tongyi” open source model, second only to Meta’s Llama series in the United States; Ali AI Model Community “ModelScope” provides more than 15000 high-quality AI models, gathering 6 million AI developers, and a cumulative download volume of more than 100 million times.
Ali Tongyi’s relevant release timeline is sorted out as follows:
- September 2022: The Tongyi Large Model Series was officially released. Alibaba Dharma Institute launched this series of ultra-large-scale language models at the 2022 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, and announced that relevant core models will be open source to developers around the world.
- April 7, 2023: Alibaba Cloud announced that “Tongyi Thousand Questions” has begun inviting testing, mainly for corporate users.
- April 11, 2023:”Tongyi Thousand Questions” was officially released at the Alibaba Cloud Summit.
- August 3, 2023: Tongyi Qianwen announced that its 7 billion-parameter universal model Qwen-7B and dialogue model Qwen-7B-Chat have been launched on the shelves, and both models are open source, free and commercially available.
- August 25, 2023: Tongyi Qianwen launched and open-source a large-scale visual language model Qwen-VL and its visual AI assistant Qwen-VL-Chat.
- September 13, 2023: The first batch of Tongyi Thousand Questions models have been registered and officially opened to the public. Taobao has also launched the internal testing application “Taobao Thousand Questions” to access Tongyi Thousand Questions.
- September 25, 2023: Tongyi Qianwen’s 14 billion-parameter model Qwen-14B and its dialogue model Qwen-14B-Chat announced open source.
- October 31, 2023: Alibaba Cloud officially upgraded and released Tongyi Qianwen 2.0, with model parameters reaching 100 billion levels. Tongyi Qianwen APP has also been officially launched in major mobile application markets.
- November 7, 2023: Tongyi Qianwen App is launched on the Apple App Store.
- December 1, 2023: Alibaba Cloud Tongyi Qianwen announced open source for the 72 billion parametric model Qwen-72B, the 1.8 billion parametric model Qwen-1.8B and the audio model Qwen-Audio.
- June 7, 2024: Ali Tongyi Thousand Questions Qwen2 model was released and simultaneously open source on Hugging Face and ModelScope.
- January 28, 2025: Alibaba has opened up its new visual understanding model Qwen2.5-VL and launched three size versions in 3B, 7B, and 72B.
- January 29, 2025: Alibaba Yuntong Yiqian Wen flagship model Qwen2.5-Max has been officially released, saying that in most benchmark tests, compared with the currently leading open source MoE model DeepSeek V3, the largest open source dense model Llama-3.1- 405B, and Qwen2.5- 72B, which is also at the forefront of open source dense models, Qwen2.5-Max has shown significant advantages. You can directly experience it on Qwen Chat or call API services through the Alibaba Cloud Refining Platform.
It is worth noting that on February 11, Apple’s “old enemy” Samsung released its latest mobile phone, the Galaxy S25, and cooperated with Smart Spectrum AI, a large model unicorn company of China based on Agenda GLM.Bring the Agent experience to Samsung’s latest mobile phone Galaxy S25 series. It can now support AI-based real-time voice and video calls, as well as visual understanding and system function invocation, AI search, copywriting and other functions. Zhipu’s C-end products, Zhipu Qingyan and Qingyan Agent platforms, have been launched on the Galaxy S25 series.
