🍭 Alibaba Helped Train Apple's AI 🧠

Good morning. Apple has now handed Siri to Google in one country and Alibaba in another. At this rate the iPhone is a very nice case.

Let’s dive in 👇

🍳 What’s Cookin’:

• Apple built a China-only model and let Alibaba help

• Google shipped another Flash three weeks later, half price

• Databricks raised $5B and still doesn't want to IPO

Apple
🔌 Built A Model Just For Beijing

The Bite:

Apple has trained a large language model specifically for the China market, with its development supported by Alibaba. That’s a departure from Apple's earlier approach of relying on Chinese existing models.

The Cyberspace Administration of China registered Apple's generative AI service in July 2026, roughly 22 months after Apple Intelligence launched elsewhere.

Alibaba's Qwen model will be integrated into Apple Intelligence on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS in China, with Baidu handling search.

Apple Intelligence is expected to reach Chinese devices in the coming months.

Snacks:

• Apple is the first foreign company Beijing has approved to offer a proprietary AI model in mainland China.

• The Cyberspace Administration registered Apple's service alongside six others, including Samsung's and Huawei's.

• Alibaba's US-listed shares rose about 4% after the July approval.

• Alibaba chairman Joe Tsai first confirmed the Apple partnership publicly in February 2025.

• Apple briefly published, then deleted, a Chinese-language guide for connecting Qwen to Siri and Writing Tools.

• Tesla began shipping ByteDance's Doubao as its in-car voice assistant in China on July 31, with DeepSeek handling conversation.

Why it Bites:

Siri was supposed to be Apple's.
Two years late, it runs on Gemini, for a reported billion dollars a year.

That's the “failure” everyone already priced in.
The interesting part is that Apple built on top of it.

Not a white-label model to fill a gap. One is a Gemini variant running on Apple's own servers. The other is a model trained by Apple, with Alibaba’s support, but filed under Apple's name.

It turned its solution into a playbook. One brain per jurisdiction, picked by whatever the local rules and local incumbents allow.

Apple is contracting brains, then keeping the keys.

Which is how a company that lost the model race walks into the one market closing its doors. And comes out looking deliberate instead of late.

Tesla rented Doubao for its cars in July and it read as a patch.

Apple has now done it twice and it reads as a doctrine.

Steal This Prompt
🌇 Watercolor City Posters

Turn any city into a dreamy watercolor poster that looks straight out of an overpriced boutique gift shop in Lisbon.

Use it to:

• Create aesthetic travel posters for your city

• Make printable Etsy-style wall art

• Turn hometowns into cozy watercolor collectibles

Workflow:

1. Hit this link: Water Coloured City Poster

2. Paste the prompt into you AI model

3. Replace the city name with your favorite place and add details

4. Watch it cook into gallery-wall-core

   Try the prompt on Snack Prompt

_ToolBox™
🧰 5 BRAND NEW AI LAUNCHES

☁️ Omni by xpander

Takes the Claude agent that dies when you close your laptop and turns it into a scheduled cloud worker your whole team can use.

🚚 Clears

Aims agents at the whole software delivery pipeline instead of the editor, which is either the logical next step or a very expensive way to find out.

📈 OpenTrade

Open-source harness that lets Claude Code place real trades through Robinhood's MCP, with cron jobs and guardrails, all running on your machine.

🔧 Bulbthings

Asset tracking for teams whose equipment inventory currently lives in a spreadsheet and three WhatsApp threads.

🎨 Blender Agent Bridge

Free MCP extension that lets Claude or Cursor inspect your Blender scene and suggest edits, with the artist approving every script before it runs.

_{Everything Else}
🧠 You Need to Know

🧠 Google Ships Gemini 3.7 Flash At Half Price
→ Released August 13 at $0.75 per million input tokens, the coding-focused model costs half what Gemini 3.6 Flash launched at.

🍎 Apple Trained Its Own China Model With Alibaba
→ Reuters reported that Apple built a China-specific LLM with Alibaba's support, becoming the first foreign firm Beijing cleared to offer its own model.

⚡ OpenAI Previews Ultrafast Mode On Cerebras Chips
→ The limited API preview opened August 13 and runs GPT-5.6 Sol at up to 750 output tokens per second, roughly 14 times standard speed.

💰 Databricks Raises $5B At $190B Valuation
→ Databricks closed the round August 13 at a valuation up 42% in six months, with annualized revenue run-rate crossing $7 billion.

🚗 Pony.ai And Uber Plan 2,000 European Robotaxis
→ The companies said they will deploy more than 2,000 Pony.ai robotaxis across four additional European cities.