TLDR: HONOR and Alibaba have officially announced a strategic partnership aimed at deeply integrating AI technologies into smartphones. This collaboration will focus on AI ecosystems, models, and intelligent services, leveraging Alibaba’s Qwen open-source model and full-stack AI capabilities to deliver advanced on-device AI experiences for HONOR MagicOS users.
HONOR and Alibaba have formalized a significant strategic cooperation agreement in Hangzhou, China, marking a pivotal moment for the future of AI-driven mobile experiences. The agreement was jointly witnessed by James Li, CEO of HONOR Device Co., Ltd., and Eddie Wu, CEO of Alibaba Group, underscoring the shared vision for growth and strategic imperatives between the two technology giants.
This comprehensive, multi-faceted, and systematic collaboration will concentrate on three critical strategic areas: AI ecosystems, AI models and capabilities, and intelligent services. The overarching goal is to cultivate a thriving AI ecosystem, capitalizing on the immense opportunities presented by AI-driven industrial transformation and the convergence of intelligent device ecosystems.
In the realm of AI agent ecosystems, HONOR and Alibaba will harness their distinct technological and ecological strengths in AI agents, large AI models, intelligent services, and innovative application experiences. This will translate into extensive cooperation across core service scenarios, including travel navigation, tourism services, lifestyle, mobile office, e-commerce, and entertainment. The partnership is set to foster technical exchanges and resource sharing, jointly exploring groundbreaking features and interaction paradigms for mobile devices.
The collaboration’s focus on AI models and capabilities will involve joint development based on Alibaba’s Qwen open-source model. This includes the creation of vertical application models specifically designed for on-device AI, AI agents, and multimodal understanding and generation. The ultimate ambition is to co-create a globally leading ‘cloud-device integrated’ intelligent device experience, seamlessly merging the power of the Qwen large model with HONOR’s cutting-edge hardware, operating systems, and diverse usage scenarios. This initiative is expected to accelerate the evolution of large model technology, emphasizing scenario-specific and on-device improvements to deliver more intelligent, personalized, secure, and fluid AI services and experiences to HONOR MagicOS users.
Furthermore, the two companies will intensify their collaboration on MaaS (Model-as-a-Service) AI capabilities. This involves continuous optimization of performance and the integration of capabilities across various modalities, including text, multimodal, image, video, and voice scenarios. They will jointly explore training, fine-tuning, and inference processes for both on-device and cloud AI models, whether based on the Qwen open-source model or developed collaboratively. The ambition is to forge advanced on-device models that achieve State-of-the-Art (SOTA) capabilities.
Looking ahead, this deep cooperation is slated for continued expansion. Leveraging Alibaba’s extensive commercial service ecosystem and through the MCP (Multi-Cloud Platform) protocol, a series of vertical intelligent agents, such as Ele.me (food delivery), Damai (ticketing), and Taopiaopiao (movie ticketing), will be progressively integrated. This will extend the Agent ecosystem to a wider array of vertical scenarios, including food delivery, entertainment, office collaboration, and e-commerce, providing users with even more convenient and efficient life services.
This initiative is designed to embed AI technology more deeply into daily life. HONOR’s upcoming HONOR Magic8 Series, positioned as a self-evolving AI native smartphone, is expected to offer a wealth of AI usage scenarios and services jointly developed by HONOR and Alibaba in China.
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This partnership marks the first time Alibaba’s full-stack AI capabilities are being fully integrated into the AI smartphone industry. In July, Honor launched its new annual foldable flagship model, the Honor Magic V5, which is already equipped with Alibaba’s Tongyi large model, alongside two vertical AI agent applications: Fliggy Travel and Amap.
