The rollout of Apple Intelligence remains slow and gradual, but the Cupertino company is slowly (with setbacks) moving forward with its plans to offer such services worldwide. You encountered an obstacle in China… or maybe not.

Chat no GPT. OpenAI’s chatbot and AI models are not available in China. In this country, regulators require generative AI services to receive government approval before they can be used by users, forcing Apple to look for alternatives.

If I can’t use the ones here, I will try to use the ones there.. Faced with this dilemma, Apple is in talks with two major Chinese technology companies that have their own chatbots, according to Reuters. These are Tencent and ByteDance, but according to sources close to the process, this negotiation is still at the preliminary stage.

Great opportunity for Apple. Recently, Apple’s market share in the Chinese market has been falling, but an agreement with one of these two companies could revive these sales. Apple’s AI platform has two main pillars: First, its own services, available both locally and in its private cloud, and partner services such as OpenAI, which can be accessed by users who believe Apple Intelligence alone is not enough. Therefore, users in China will be able to access chatbots developed by Tencent or ByteDance instead of ChatGPT if they need it.

China tightens control over AI models. China has had to overcome significant hurdles to develop AI technology. There is a veto on access to advanced AI chips from companies like NVIDIA, but despite this, companies in this country have managed to develop LLM and chatbots that look to compete head-to-head with ChatGPT or Gemini, for example. ByteDance has Doubao, Tencent has Hunyuan, and Baidu has Ernie.

They already tried this with Baidu. These negotiations follow a previous attempt by Apple, which talked with Baidu to integrate its chatbot in China rather than OpenAI. According to The Information, these talks failed. On the one hand, due to technical problems encountered while performing this integration. On the other hand, because of the potential use of iPhone interaction data to train artificial intelligence models.

Without AI, Apple is at a disadvantage. The truth is that Apple has a problem with this because its competitors in China are starting to offer this type of integration with local chatbots. Its iPhones have also faced tough competition from models from Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei, which has reemerged strongly and now offers the promising Huawei Mate 70.

US government may take action. While ChatGPT is not directly available in China, as noted on TechRadar, there is a way to use it there through Microsoft and the Azure platform. But a few days ago, The Wall Street Journal reported that the US government was considering introducing new regulations. This will further hinder the sale of AI technology to China.

Danger for Apple. With such measures, trade wars often intensify with the argument of national security concerns. In any case, the US has not taken such measures, but doing so would be a serious blow to the ambitions of Apple, which will not be able to fully compete in the field of artificial intelligence in China.

Image | OpenAI | Alejandro Luengo

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