The need to meet market demands forces Apple to look for local partners in China to introduce artificial intelligence systems into the proprietary ecosystem used by iPhone owners in this country. According to unofficial data, negotiations in this area between Apple and Tencent and ByteDance have already begun.
Image Source: Apple
Due to restrictions of Chinese legislation, which require the creators of artificial intelligence systems to obtain permission from the authorities to operate them within the country, and prohibit the use of foreign services, Apple was unable to offer buyers of iPhone 16 family smartphones in China the same services that it began promoting in the current quarter in a number of Western countries, where it was possible to integrate the branded voice assistant Siri with the ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI.
In China, Apple will also have to rely on partners for help, and the company has already begun negotiations with Tencent and ByteDance, which have proprietary artificial intelligence systems Hunyuan and Doubao, respectively. Apple also tried to negotiate with the Chinese company Baidu, which has the Ernie chatbot, but potential partners encountered technical difficulties along the way. In addition, the companies varied in their assessments of the possibility of using iPhone user data to train Baidu’s language models.
The ability to quickly implement support for artificial intelligence systems localized in China is important for Apple, since in the second quarter of this year it fell out of the top five largest smartphone suppliers in the local market for the first time. The debut of the iPhone 16 family allowed it to return to the top five, but Apple’s smartphone sales in the third quarter still decreased year-on-year by 0.3%, while Huawei’s sales grew by 42%. The latter has its own artificial intelligence systems, which are initially created taking into account the characteristics of the Chinese market.