Alibaba saw its US listed shares jump 4% after the company confirmed its Qwen AI model is heading to Apple devices in China. The tech giant will embed the system into iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS. An Alibaba representative shared the news with CNBC, ending a long regulatory wait in Beijing. The approval comes as both the US and China push for dominance in the machine learning space.
Getting into this market is tough. Beijing recently greenlit the service alongside local software from competitors like Huawei. This regulatory win happens during a tense period. US lawmakers are already looking to restrict how domestic firms adopt Chinese software. For example, Meta was recently forced to scrap a $2 billion dollar acquisition of a Chinese startup called Manus after Beijing ordered them to unwind the transaction
. Alibaba also took steps of its own by preventing employees from working with Anthropic software.
The deal lets users access Qwen directly through native Apple features. That means tasks like translating text or understanding images happen within the operating system. You will not have to swap back and forth between different apps. This development aligns with rumors that Apple is looking for ways to shrink massive neural networks so they run locally on phones.
The tech is already shrinking fast. A startup named PrismML recently managed to squeeze a massive 54 gigabyte version of the Qwen model down to just 4 gigabytes. This Khosla Ventures backed company claims the compressed model still holds all 27 billion parameters. This allows the software to run entirely on an iPhone 15 or newer model. Apple is reportedly talking to this Silicon Valley firm to see how to run these setups directly on user hardware.
