Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S24 smartphones during a media preview event on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024, in Seoul, South Korea. Samsung, the world's top smartphone maker, is leaning on artificial intelligence as the key to unlocking more sales this year. . Photographer: Seongjoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Seongjoon Cho | Bloomberg | Good pictures
Artificial Intelligence Phones: These are the buzz words you'll hear this year as smartphone players look to jump on the AI hype to boost sales of their devices after a tough period.
OpenAI's ChatGPT, released in late 2022, has spurred huge interest in generative AI, specifically — models trained on large amounts of data that can generate text, images, and stimuli from user videos. Since then, AI excitement has touched every field and entered the popular imagination.
Smartphone makers are eyeing an opportunity to cash in at Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world's largest mobile industry trade show, which begins Monday in Barcelona, Spain.
“No one wants to be seen behind the curve, and AI is the talk of the town. It's a buzzword that all vendors are going to jump on this year,” Brian Ma, vice president of client devices research at ITC, told CNBC.
Gear is difficult to define and depends on which manufacturer you ask.
Analysts who spoke with CNBC agree on a few things — these devices will have advanced chips to run AI applications., And those AI applications run on the device rather than in the cloud.
Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have introduced smartphone chipsets that cater to the processing power requirement.I amRed for AI applications.
But AI technology in phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in devices for years and have allowed for features like background blur effects and image editing in smartphones.
What's new is the introduction of larger language models and generative AI. Big language models are massive AI models trained on vast amounts of data that support applications such as widely popular chatbots. These models open up new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images or text from user instructions.
“It's not just about having a chatbot, we've had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, It builds now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. “If it's about text-to-image creation, that's something that hasn't been done before,” Ma said.
The other big piece of the AI smartphone puzzle is the term “in-device AI”. Previously, many AI applications on devices were actually partially processed in the cloud and then downloaded onto the phone. But advanced chips and the ability for large language models to effectively become smaller will enable more AI applications to run on 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 devices, and that will start to become a bit of a game changer,” says Ben Wood, principal analyst at CCS Insight. , told CNBC.
Smartphone makers claim that on-device AI improves the security of the gear, unlocks new apps and makes them faster because the processing is done on the handset.
Both Ma and Wood said this could open up new applications that developers can build.
Ultimately, Wood said, smartphone makers want to achieve “anticipatory computing” — the idea that AI is “intelligent enough to learn your behavior as a user, make the device more intuitive, and predict what you want to do next.” Do a lot.”
Kind of. AI has been used in devices for some time, but the new era of on-device AI with large language samples is still in its infancy.
Device makers at MWC are going to be showing off a lot of AI-powered features — and we're already seeing some of them. In January, Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone range, touting its AI capabilities. One feature that caught the eye is that you can hover over an image or text you see in any app and instantly search for it on Google.
MWC will include demonstrations of AI features, from camera apps to chatbots on phones.
But the truth is, according to IDC's Ma, many of these offerings aren't actually on-device and still rely on processing in the cloud. Even with AI capabilities in devices, he said, it will be a “number of years” before third-party developers find a “killer use case or a compelling use case that consumers can't do without.”
Wood said the danger is that smartphone manufacturers talk more about AI than about the experiences the technology can provide users.
“Consumers don't know what an AI smartphone is, and they need use cases to get around it,” Wood said. The danger is “AI fatigue”.
Ultimately, the superior AI experiences that smartphone makers dream of may be a long way off.
“We're building an incredible foundation for AI on the device. 2024 will be the year we look back and say it started happening, but it may be a long time before we start seeing these benefits in terms of game-changing experiences,” Wood said.
