Apple Inc. and Alibaba partnered to add artificial intelligence ( AI ) capabilities to the iPhone, disregarding US lawmakers ‘ request to end all American and Chinese company partnerships.  ,
Apple’s share amount increased to US$ 241.5 on Thursday, up 6.4 % from Tuesday, when The Knowledge first reported the media. Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares have surged 18 % to HK$ 124.1 ( US$ 15.9 ) from Tuesday to Friday.  ,
Last year, Apple sold 42.9 million iPhones in China, down 17 % from 2024. The business placed first. 3 in the Chinese handset industry, following Vito and Huawei. In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2024, Apple generated about 17 % of its revenue from China.  ,
” Apple has always been finicky. When they finally agreed to work with us, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai said to writers while attending the Dubai World Governments Summit. They want to power their phones with our AI technologies.
Apple Intelligence
In June, Apple announced it had start Apple Intelligence, an AI-powered private knowledge program for its phone, iPad, and Mac.  ,
The new function, according to Apple chips, would enable them to comprehend and make language and images, act across apps, and use specific context to make tasks easier and quicker.  ,
People of the most recent Apple tools, including all of the phone 16 designs and the phone 15 Pro and Pro Max, started using Apple Intelligence to modify messages and emails, emphasize their notifications, and modify photos in October.  ,
Users may use Apple Intelligence on their products or Apple’s Personal Cloud Compute system for AI tasks that call for a lot of computing power.  ,
Apple had planned to collaborate with Baidu before discovering that its AI concepts, according to The Information, weren’t really what it wanted.  ,
According to the review, Apple had little choice but to look for a Chinese partner to have its AI tools approved by authorities.
Apple’s AI devices are anticipated to be accessible to phone users in China starting in May.  ,
Alibaba’s bot
Apple’s decision to promote AI information or systems with Alibaba is undetermined, nor will it include the AI robot Tongyi Qianwen or Qwen from Alibaba in smartphones for sale in China.
In May next month, Alibaba launched Qwen2.5, which has 500 million to 110 billion guidelines. More characteristics frequently result in stronger models.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT3 has about 175 billion characteristics, while ChatGPT4 has about 1.8 trillion guidelines. The layout of ChatGPT4 consists of eight types, each of which has 220 billion guidelines.  ,
On January 28 this month, Alibaba unveiled Qwen2.5-Max, which claims to have been trained on over 20 trillion guidelines. It said Qwen2.5-Max performs much better than DeepSeek.
It would be no wonder if Qwen2.5 you do better than DeepSeek. DeepSeek’s designers said in a research report on January 22 that they had “distilled” data from Qwen2.5 when training their AI models.  ,
In the process of “knowledge distillation”, DeepSeek is a student who keeps asking questions to a competent educator, such as ChatGPT or Qwen2.5 and uses the responses to fine-tune its reasoning.  ,
In this situation, Qwen2.5 is a professor trained by Alibaba with powerful technology skills, while DeepSeek is a student, or a clone of another AI models.
Zhou Chang, an engine engineer at Alibaba and the person in charge of the Qwen2.5 AI design, left Alibaba final July, taking along a group of about 10 technicians to meet ByteDance.  ,
Media reports said Zhou’s annual salary at Alibaba was about 2 million yuan ( US$ 275, 691 ). ByteDance provided Zhou with a deal worth at least 10 million renminbi. However, according to reports, Alibaba sued him, claiming that he was barred from joining a rival.  ,
US regulations
The Biden presidency finalized a set of regulations last October that would ban US purchases in some national security products and technologies in China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
The laws, effective on January 2 this month, include China’s AI, Quantum and silicon areas.  ,
The Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced a costs titled” Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act of 2025″ on January 29 that would ban the import and export of relational AI systems or intellectual property.  ,
If passed by the US Congress, the Act does stop people from “importing” smartphones powered by Taiwanese AI systems. But, whether and when this act will be passed is still a problem.
The Asia Times has Yong Jian as a source. He is a Chinese columnist who specializes in Chinese technologies, economy and politics.  ,