Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy S24 smartphone during a media preview event on Monday, January 15, 2024 in Seoul, South Korea. Samsung, the world’s most prolific smartphone maker, is leaning on artificial intelligence as the key to boosting sales this year.Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Cho Sung Joon | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificially intelligent mobile phones: These are the buzzwords you’re likely to hear this year. Smartphone players aim to jump on his AI promotion to boost sales of their devices after a difficult period.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparked significant interest in generative AI, particularly models trained on vast amounts of data that can generate text, images, and prompts from users’ videos. Since then, the excitement around AI has touched every industry and permeated people’s imaginations.
Smartphone makers are seizing the opportunity to cash in and will promote the technology at Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s largest mobile industry trade show, which opens in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday.
“No one wants to be seen as outdated. AI is just a hot topic. It’s the buzzword of the year that all vendors will jump on,” said Brian Marr, vice president of client device research. Masu. IDC told CNBC.
Gear is more difficult to define and depends on which manufacturer you ask.
Analysts interviewed by CNBC broadly agree on several points. That means these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications., And those AI apps will run on-device rather than in the cloud.
Companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that enable the required processing power.IRed for AI applications.
However, AI technology in mobile phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been built into devices for years, enabling features like background blur effects and image editing on smartphones.
What is new is the introduction of large-scale language models and generative AI. Large-scale language models are large AI models trained on vast amounts of data that power applications such as widely used chatbots. These models enable new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images and text from user prompts.
“Rather than just introducing chatbots, we have been implementing these virtual assistants for some time.The difference is:, Now that it’s generative, you can compose a poem or summarize a meeting. If it’s about text-to-image creation, that’s something that hasn’t been done before,” Marr said.
Another big piece of the AI smartphone puzzle is the term “on-device AI.” Previously, many AI applications on devices were actually partially processed in the cloud and then downloaded to the phone. However, advanced chips and the ability to effectively miniaturize large language models could mean that more AI applications will run only within devices rather than data centers.
“I think one of the big talking points at MWC is that AI models can run natively on the device itself, and that’s where the potential for AI to be a little bit more transformative comes from,” said Principal Analyst at CCS Insight. , said Ben Wood. he told CNBC.
Smartphone makers say that on-device AI improves the security of the device, unlocks new applications and makes it even faster, since the processing takes place on the handset.
This could potentially enable new applications that developers can create, Marr and Wood said.
Ultimately, smartphone manufacturers will use “predictive computing,” or AI, to “learn what you do as a user, make your device more intuitive, and predict what you want to do next without any interaction on your part.” “We’re smart enough to do it,” Wood said. Please do it a lot. ”
In a sense. Although AI has been around in devices for some time, the new era of on-device AI with large-scale language models is still in its infancy.
Device makers will be showing off a lot of AI-powered features at MWC, some of which we’ve already seen. In January, Samsung launched its flagship smartphone series, the Galaxy S24, touting its AI capabilities. One feature that caught our attention was the ability to circle any image or text you see on the app and instantly search it on Google.
MWC is likely to feature demonstrations of AI capabilities, from camera apps to chatbots on mobile phones.
But the reality is that many of these benefits aren’t actually on the device and still rely on processing in the cloud, IDC’s Ma said. He said that even if devices do come with AI capabilities, it will take “many years” for third-party developers to find “a killer use case, or a use case that’s compelling enough for consumers to live without.” He added that it would be.
The danger, Wood said, is that smartphone makers talk too much about AI and not about the experience the technology can provide users.
“Consumers have no idea what an AI smartphone is. They need use cases to understand it,” Wood said. The risk is that there is “AI fatigue.”
After all, the lofty AI experiences that smartphone makers dream of may be a long way off.
“We’re building an incredible foundational platform for AI on devices. 2024 is going to be the year we look back and say that’s where it all started. But… It can take a long time before you start to see that benefit from a gaming standpoint, ‘changing the experience,”’ Wood said.
