China’s Alibaba surges on news of Apple Intelligence partnership
Alibaba’s stock price surged as the Chinese e-commerce giant made progress in its partnership with Apple to roll out Apple Intelligence features in China.
Raffaele Huang and Tracy Qu for The Wall Street Journal:
Apple recently submitted Apple Intelligence features for China, developed with Alibaba, for approval by the country’s cyberspace regulator, a person familiar with the matter said. The review process could take months, the person said.
The news, earlier reported by The Information, sent Alibaba’s shares 7.8% higher to 113.10 Hong Kong dollars, equivalent to $14.53, on track for their biggest daily gain in almost two years.
Apple rolled out Apple Intelligence last year, a new AI tool which includes an improved Siri voice assistant as well as a variety of text-generation and photo-editing capabilities. Chinese regulators require Apple to work with local companies to develop the generative AI services it plans to release in the country.
Alibaba provides a conversational chatbot service, Qwen, and has released models ranked highly for their performance by global researchers in Chatbot Arena.
MacDailyNews Take: The sooner Apple Intelligence features in Mac, iPad, and, especially, iPhone hit China, the better.
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