After talking to many parties, why did Apple ultimately choose only Alibaba?
On October 31, the official announcement finally came: Apple and Alibaba have formally reached a cooperation agreement, allowing Chinese users to directly use Alibaba’s Qwen within Siri, writing tools, and visual intelligence applications. After more than two years of waiting, Apple Intelligence is finally coming to mainland China. Interestingly, over the past two years, numerous domestic large-model companies—Baidu, Tencent, ByteDance, DeepSeek, Zhipu…—have all been linked to Apple in one way or another. So why was it only Alibaba’s Qwen that ended up “winning the prize”? In fact, if we look closely, we’ll find that Apple had no real choice but to go with Alibaba. 01. Compliance Is the First Barrier Overseas, Apple Intelligence’s main partners are OpenAI and Google. But in China, neither of these companies’ models is available. However, this doesn’t mean that models which are usable domestically and properly registered can simply be integrated into Apple Intelligence; they still require separate on-device generative AI service registration. Meanwhile, as a hand...
