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In the end, as expected, Beijing and its version of artificial intelligence won. It won a market in decline, but indispensable for the Cupertino company. Between tea with Prime Minister Li Qiang and a chat with Trade Minister Wang Wentao, Apple’s number one, Tim Cook, in the Chinese capital for the China development forum and to inaugurate the second largest flagship store in the world in Shanghai, chose Baidu, the search engine equivalent to Google, for the iPhone 16 and the iOS 18 operating system with ErnieBot artificial intelligence developed by Baidu.
Obligatory route
The choice was good for the stock market, Baidu gained 6% on the stock market in Hong Kong. There was no other way to get in line with the Chinese legal system, other than to embrace technology made in China. In the wake of Chatgpt, Beijing supported, just a few months later, the development of the artificial intelligence of its high tech champions, at least forty of them, led by Alibaba and Baidu. Apple, for its part, has done nothing but follow in the footsteps of the Korean Samsung who integrated ErnieBot into their Galaxy S24 smartphones in China.
As is known, so far only the European Union has established very strict and coherent regulations on AI, but China is traveling on its own tracks, almost a parallel world with rules that are not yet well defined but which represent a barrier to entry. After all, Apple’s sales are plummeting and China is too strategic a market to make missteps.
Tra Baidu e Alibaba
Among other things, it was said that Tim Cook was in negotiations with Alibaba which in turn has an AI but in reality it then chose Baidu. The path would see Apple rely on one of the leading companies in the high-tech segment in China to support the artificial intelligence innovations of the next iOS 18 operating system, at the basis of the future generation of iPhone 16 expected in the autumn, which is based on generative artificial intelligence .
In the rest of the world, however, the hypothesis of collaboration with Google and its Gemini model is increasingly clear, while in Beijing the obligatory move is a local reality against government blocks on foreign models. For China, security is an absolute priority.