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China’s future iPhones may come with AI capabilities powered by Baidu’s ERNIE chatbot.
Apple is in talks with the Chinese web giant to integrate its machine learning technology into iPhones sold in the Middle Kingdom, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. It seems like it is.
To strengthen its AI ambitions, Cupertino has been considering integrating third-party models from Google (which, interestingly, invented BERT) and OpenAI into its iDevices. Doing so, at least in China, may run into obstacles.
Last summer, Chinese authorities enacted rules requiring regulatory review before models can be released to the public. This is presumably to ensure that guardrails are in place to prevent them from generating reactions that are inconsistent with government policy.
Announced in early 2023, ERNIE is Baidu’s attempt at a ChatGPT-style large-scale language model, with self-censoring capabilities, as we reported at the time. The chatbot remained silent when asked about Chinese President Xi Jinping, but other political questions ranging from Tiananmen Square to the treatment of the Uyghur minority were rejected outright.
Apple already uses Baidu as the default search engine for iPhones sold in China, so it’s no wonder Cupertino would consider expanding its relationship to include AI.
If Apple were to integrate ERNIE into a device for the Chinese market, it wouldn’t be the first. Samsung already uses Baidu’s ERNIE chatbot in its Galaxy smartphones sold in China. In other parts of the world, the South Korean electronics giant relies on Google’s Gemini.
Until recently, Apple largely avoided using the term AI in its marketing, preferring the term machine learning to describe features built into its smartphones, tablets, and Macs.
Apple’s software already makes extensive use of ML, whether it’s processing photos, performing object detection or optical character recognition, or suggesting apps based on usage patterns. Most of these operations are performed on the device’s integrated neural processing unit (NPU) whenever possible.
Meanwhile, outside the Apple bubble, “AI” PCs and smartphones are flooding the market. Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm have all announced chips with integrated neural network accelerators that process advanced models on personal devices rather than in the cloud.
Perhaps with this in mind, Apple is starting to embrace AI in its marketing. iGiant touts its recently launched M3 MacBook Air as “the world’s best AI-enabled consumer laptop,” with the ability to run his LLM and diffusion models locally on the machine “with great performance.” I emphasized.
However, it is not clear at this time whether Apple intends to build LLM into the operating system or instead integrate it using API calls to remote models. We suspect we’ll hear more about Apple’s AI strategy at WWDC in June. ®
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