- Smartphone manufacturers rushed to Mobile World Congress to show off new AI features.
- More AI tools are moving to devices, which will make them run faster and cost less.
- This may give us more convenient devices, but it’s unclear whether it will boost mobile sales.
- This article is part of the 5G and Connectivity Playbook, a series that explores some of the most important technological innovations of our time.
You won’t be able to turn a corner at Mobile World Congress in 2024 without someone mentioning “artificial intelligence.” These words were thrown around vaguely in keynotes and roundtables, but one thing became clear. That means AI is definitely coming to our smartphones.
A technology event in Barcelona brought together several companies and chipmakers to demonstrate how generative AI tools are making their way into our pockets.
Sure, your phone already has access to ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini chatbot, but these require an internet connection to offload all the heavy processing.
Now, as the industry looks to capitalize on the AI boom to revitalize a stagnant mobile market, phone manufacturers want AI tools to run locally on the phones themselves.
In theory, it’s a win for everyone. If the large language models powering the AI were running on your phone instead of on a faraway server, everything would run a little faster and you wouldn’t have to send as much personal data to some remote server. Masu. For companies that make cell phones, it gives them something shiny new to dangle in front of their customers.
Running an LLM is also very expensive. Companies are now willing to accept some of the costs to get their hot products into the hands of more users, but this won’t last for long, especially as more users means more costs. .
“If you look at some of the Morgan Stanley research, it’s expensive to run any number of queries,” said Francisco Chen, senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm. “At some point we will reach a tipping point.”
Qualcomm doesn’t make cell phones, but it does make the chips that power many cell phones. The company was at MWC touting how it’s helping phone makers like Samsung and Honor run more AI tools on their phones.
Cheng said Qualcomm is primarily working on smaller, open-source models, such as Meta’s LLaMA 7B, which are designed to run on low-power devices.
Samsung was also there to preview some of the AI tools it’s starting to roll out on its phones, including a nifty live translation feature. Some companies, like Xiaomi, have shown off video editing tools that can remove unwanted photobombers from family vacation photos in just a few seconds.
The AI boom has arrived at the right time. Smartphone sales were sluggish for two years from 2022 to 2023, but there have been signs of recovery recently. Still, the field continues to grow, especially as users wait longer to upgrade their phones, and new AI capabilities, whether running entirely on the phone or in conjunction with the cloud, continue to grow. This market remains a difficult one as it has the potential to be devastating.
Google Assistant and Siri once promised us a future where our smartphones would act like personal concierges, but so far that hasn’t happened.
At MWC, it feels like device makers are toying with the idea again. Companies like Motorola know that commuter traffic is especially bad, so they’ve shown off the concept of a personalized AI assistant that can do everything from scheduling tasks to waking you up before your alarm. .
Some of these concepts, such as Motorola’s MotoAI, run entirely locally. IDC analyst Francisco Geronimo told Business Insider that a fully personalized AI smartphone assistant is the logical endpoint for all of this, which is why keeping personal data on the device becomes so important. Told.
Geronimo said: “What the likes of Samsung and Xiaomi have announced is a step forward, but it’s still not the answer to the intelligent mobile phones of the future, true digital personal assistants that adapt to the way you use them.” said.
Some are already imagining what that future will look like. Deutsche Telekom and his Brain.ai were present at his MWC, where he demoed a smartphone with an AI interface that ditched apps completely. Rather than swiping or tapping the app, users type in a specific task or enter a voice command (in one demo, the AI says, “Create a cool image of a soccer ball.” It was shown responding to requests and producing a series of AI-generated images).
“The last 10 years have been all about how many apps exist to help us,” Geronimo says. “So? The fewer apps you have, the better your phone will be.”
