While the US battles with its final decision of barring TikTok from the nation due to its parent firm originating in China, tech giant Apple is also making headlines with one of its recent decisions.
The leading iPhone maker has given the green signal to Chinese search engine giant Baidu to give AI features for a host of its products in the nation. This entails the latest iPhone 16 that will be launched soon.
The company rolled out a more secure deal with the iPhone maker that would power the next lineup of iPhones, iOS, and even MacOS. Such latest endeavors in the world of AI tech across China’s domestic market mean saying hello to more interactions than ever before. This report was just confirmed by the country’s own media house, China Star Market.
Sources that were familiar with this matter added how the tech giant selected Baidu after it held conversations with the country’s leading e-commerce giant Alibaba. This discussion also included another leading AI firm whose name is yet to be disclosed so far.
Apple has been on the hunt for a leading partner from China so that it could better comply with a host of local rules and would end up making use of the AI model right outside the country.
The latest ruling on this front arose after the company’s CEO Tim Cook embarked on a visit of two to the Chinese nation where he is believed to have inaugurated the second biggest Apple Store in the world, located in the Chinese capital city of Shanghai.
He similarly announced the rollout of a soon-to-be-released Vision Pro device from Apple during the latter part of 2024.
Meanwhile, we’re also seeing other arch rivals to Apple like South Korean tech giant Samsung partner up with Baidu. In January, we saw the South Korean company mention how its Galaxy S24 range of products would be the world’s first AI-powered smartphone devices and would be running across the country’s Ernie Bot that Baidu itself designs.
Other than China, the latest Galaxy S24 lineup from Samsung is powered using Google’s AI model Gemini. The latter is currently blocked in the country, alongside other leading AI tools like ChatGPT and an array of leading chatbots from the West.
While tech giant Samsung doesn’t happen to be among the top five leading phone brands across China, it’s interesting how Apple posted details about its record year and how it was oversaturating the market with a massive shareholding of 17.3% in the year 2023 as per stats from the International Data Corporation.
Such kinds of collaborations and partnerships with big tech giants are believed to help Baidu in terms of making its mark as a top AI leader in the Chinese nation when you compare it to other rising domestic names like ByteDance, Alibaba, and even Tencent.
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