What is an AI-based smartphone? Samsung, the major players are talking about technology

Smartphone makers see an opportunity to capitalize on this technology and will promote the technology at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world's largest mobile phone industry trade show, which kicks off Monday in Barcelona, ​​Spain.

“No one wants to be seen as being left behind, and AI is just the talk of the town. It's the buzzword this year that all vendors will be jumping on,” Brian Ma, vice president of client device research at IDC, told CNBC.

It is difficult to determine the gear, and it depends on the manufacturer you order.

Analysts who spoke to CNBC generally agree on a few things — that these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications., And that these AI applications will run on the device and not in the cloud.

Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that meet the processing power requirementsIRed color for artificial intelligence applications.

But AI technology inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been present in devices for years and have allowed for features such as background blur effects on smartphones and photo editing.

What is new is the introduction of large language models and generative artificial intelligence. Big language models are massive AI models trained on massive amounts of data that power applications such as the wildly popular chatbots. These forms open up new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images or text from a user prompt.

“It's not just about having a chatbot, we've had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, It's become productive now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. “If it's about creating text and turning it into an image, this is something that has never been done before,” Ma said.

The other big piece of the smartphone AI puzzle is the term “on-device AI.” Previously, many on-device AI applications were partially processed in the cloud and then downloaded to the phone. But advanced chips and the ability of large language models to become smaller will likely lead to more AI applications running only in the device, rather than in the data center.

“I think one of the big stories at MWC will be the ability for AI models to run natively on the devices themselves, and that's where it potentially starts to change the game a little bit,” said Ben Wood, senior analyst at CCS Insight. , to CNBC.

Smartphone makers say on-device AI improves device security, unlocks new apps and also makes them faster, since the processing is done on the phone.

This could open up new applications that developers can create, Ma and Wood said.

Wood said smartphone makers eventually want to achieve “proactive computing” — the idea that AI is “smart enough to know your behavior as a user and make the device much more intuitive and predict what you want to do next without you having to.” He does a lot.”

somewhat. AI has been used on devices for some time, but the new era of on-device AI with large language models is still in its infancy.

Device makers will be showing off plenty of AI-powered features at MWC — and we're already seeing some of them. In January, Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S24 range of smartphones, to promote the capabilities of artificial intelligence. One feature that caught my attention is the ability to circle an image or text you see in any app, then instantly search for it on Google.

MWC is likely to include demonstrations of AI features, from camera apps to chatbots on phones.

But the reality is that many of these privileges don't actually exist on the device and still rely on processing in the cloud, IDC's Ma said. He added that even with on-device AI capabilities, it will take “a number of years” before third-party developers discover a “killer use case or a compelling use case that the consumer can't live without.”

Wood said the danger is that smartphone manufacturers talk too much about artificial intelligence, rather than the experiences the technology can provide users.

“Consumers have no idea what an AI smartphone is, they need use cases to wrap their heads around it,” Wood said. The danger is that there is “AI fatigue.”

Ultimately, the heightened AI experiences that smartphone makers dream of may be a long way off.

“We're building an incredible underlying platform for on-device AI. 2024 will be the year we look back and say this is where it all started, but it may be a long time before we start leveraging those benefits in game terms,” he said. Wood: “Changing Experiences.”