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Chinese technology company Alibaba Group has teamed up with Apple to bring its Qwen artificial intelligence model into Apple Intelligence for the Chinese market, according to a Saturday report by state-run Xinhua news agency.
Qwen is a family of large language models, which are AI systems trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human language.
Apple Intelligence is the name of Apple’s suite of AI features built into its devices. Xinhua is China’s official state news agency.
The feature will be available for testing in the latest iOS developer beta starting Nov. 4 and will launch with the official iOS 27.3 release in December, Alibaba said.
An iOS developer beta is a pre-release version of Apple’s iPhone operating system that lets software developers test new features before the public launch.
Qwen’s AI capabilities will be integrated into several Apple features, including Siri, Writing Tools and Visual Intelligence. Siri is Apple’s voice assistant, Writing Tools help users rewrite, proofread and summarize text, and Visual Intelligence lets users get information about what their iPhone camera sees.
Users can choose whether to enable the integration and what information to share. Alibaba said user requests and generated responses would not be used to train its AI models.
The feature will be available on compatible iPhones whose device location and Apple Account region are both set to China.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said the partnership would bring new AI-powered services to Chinese users.
Wang Xiaojie, an AI expert at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, said this marked the first time a major global consumer hardware maker had adopted a Chinese large language model as its primary system-level AI backbone in the Chinese market.
A system-level AI backbone refers to the core AI technology that runs across an operating system’s built-in features.
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