Apple’s AI push faces daunting challenges in China
Apple Intelligence — the personal intelligence system for iPhone, iPad, and Mac — combines the power of generative models with personal context to deliver intelligence that’s useful and relevant to the user.
Apple Intelligence is Apple’s method of bringing artificial intelligence to its devices, but CCP-controlled China’s stringent rules on AI pose a big challenge, analysts told CNBC.
The uncertain path in China comes at a time when Apple’s market share is being eroded in the world’s second largest economy by a resurgent Huawei and other local smartphones players, which are talking up their AI features.
Apple… was, however, quiet on the product offering in China during the AI launch at its annual developers conference this month.
That’s likely to do with China’s stringent rules on AI, analysts told CNBC, as Apple tries to figure out how to approach the complex market.
“China is in another world when it comes to AI given the regulatory environment there, so China is a big asterisk on Apple’s big announcements last week,” Bryan Ma, vice president of devices research at IDC, told CNBC via email.
Some of the features of Apple Intelligence are based on Apple’s own language model, which runs on both the phone and on the company’s own servers.
Under Chinese rules, Apple would likely need to get its AI model approved by authorities.
Secondly, one of the biggest announcements this month was that Apple’s voice assistant Siri can tap into OpenAI’s ChatGPT for certain requests — but ChatGPT is banned in China, meaning Apple would have to find an equivalent domestic partner.
Meanwhile, China’s internet is heavily censored with regulators concerned about the potential for AI services to generate content, which may go against Beijing’s views or ideology.
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MacDailyNews Take: Imagine asking Siri about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in China. iPhones in China that offer Apple Intelligence, if any ever really do, will need to be severely dumbed down and heavily censored.
Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. — Potter Stewart
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