Apple is in talks with two of China's largest tech conglomerates to use their artificial intelligence models in iPhones sold in China.
According to Reuters ea OFApple executives have been talking to their counterparts at Tencent and Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, about integrating their AI models into iPhones sold in China.
The US company began rolling out OpenAI's ChatGPT to its devices this month, part of the Apple Intelligence product that allows its Siri voice assistant to leverage the chatbot experience even on user queries about photos and documents such as presentations.
But ChatGPT is not available in China, and the country's regulatory requirements dictate that generative AI services obtain government approval before publication. This has forced Apple to seek local partners for its AI capabilities at a time when its market share in the country is declining.
Apple's talks with Tencent and ByteDance about using their artificial intelligence models are at a very early stage, according to three sources, who declined to be named because the talks are not public.
ByteDance declined to comment, while Apple and Tencent did not immediately respond to requests for comment, it reports Reuters.
A successful partner for Apple's artificial intelligence services in China could be a big winner in the country's increasingly crowded field of artificial intelligence, where dozens of large language models have been launched by big tech companies and startups.
These include ByteDance's Doubao, Tencent's Hunyuan and search engine giant Baidu's Ernie.
Apple and Baidu have reportedly talked about using the latter's artificial intelligence model in China, but The Information reported that discussions have encountered setbacks due to technical issues, including disputes over using iPhone user data to train artificial intelligence models.
The absence of artificial intelligence capabilities in the latest iPhones sold in China has become a major obstacle for Apple, which faces a declining market share in the world's largest smartphone market due to growing competition from domestic brands among including Huawei.
Huawei, which returned to the high-end market in August with a phone that uses a Chinese-made chip, has launched its Mate 70 series last month with artificial intelligence capabilities powered by its proprietary large language model.
Apple briefly fell out of the top five smartphone sellers in China in the second quarter before recovering in the third quarter. The US company's smartphone sales in China still fell 0.3% during the third quarter from a year earlier, while Huawei's sales rose 42%, according to research firm IDC.
Maddalena Ingrao
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