Submitted 1 year ago by schizoidman@lemm.ee to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.semafor.com/article/02/13/2025/apple-to-use-chinese-giant-alibabas-ai-in-iphones
cross-posted from: lemm.ee/post/55428692
Since people don’t click through and read articles, it should be pointed out that this is specifically for the Chinese market in order for Apple to try and get back market share in China where they’ve been falling behind Huawei and others.
Or they could just lower the prices
It’s not prices so much as it is the fact that Chinese services are huge for Chinese citizens and not having them is a detriment.
The bloomberg article was paywalled for me, and I didn’t see that in the original.
they should’ve used Alibaba/Qwen for their other markets, too.
Which would get them banned from all government use. Smart call.
Reminder, Apple was always going to use a Chinese service for China. ChatGPT is banned in China.
Third party model integration is pretty dumb in Apple intelligence. When Apple’s private model hits a dead end, it asks if you want to throw the prompt into a bigger model.
Eventually, like with search, people will people to select the default model that they integrate with.
For context, Alibaba is behind Qwen 2.5, which is the best series of LLMs for desktop/self-hosting use. Most of the series is Apache licensed, free to use, and they’re what Deepseek based their smaller distillations on. Thier 32B/72B models, especially finetunes of them, can run circles around cheaper OpenAI models you’d need an $100,000+ fire-breathing server to run… if OpenAI actually realeased anything for public use.
So… Yeah, if I were Apple, I would’ve picked Qwen/Alibaba too. They’re the undisputed king of models that would fit in an iPhone’s memory pool, at the moment.
Deepseek R1 is currently the selfhosting model to use
Some of the distillations are trained on top of Qwen 2.5.
And for some cases, FuseAI (a special merge of several thinking models), Qwen Coder, EVA-Gutenberg Qwen, or some other specialized models do a better job than Deepseek 32B in certain niches.
How do you Apache license a LLM? Do they just treat the weights as code?
It’s software, so yeah, I suppose. See for yourself: huggingface.co/Qwen/QwQ-32B-Preview
Deepseek chose MIT: huggingface.co/…/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B
For whatever reason, the Chinese companies tend to go with very permissive licensing, while Cohere, Mistral, Meta (Llama), and some others add really weird commercial restrictions. IBM Granite is actually Apache 2.0 and way more “open” and documented than even the Chinese tech companies, but unfortunately their models are “small” (3B) and not very cutting edge.
A match made in Hell.
Apple’s outsourced just about every other aspect of its business to Chinese tech companies. I don’t see why this would be different.
Zerlyna@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m no expert but with musk likely doing a hostile takeover of OpenAI I’m down with this.
daddy32@lemmy.world 1 year ago
He’s not doing a takeover.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
Eh, no, still hard no.
Just because one evil becomes a bigger evil that doesn’t mean we should just use the other evil
DandomRude@lemmy.world 1 year ago
DandomRude@lemmy.world 1 year ago
True that. It’s the lesser evil. That would probably even be the case if it wasn’t just a deal for the Chinese market.