This year, artificial intelligence (AI) phones will probably be all the rage as smartphone manufacturers try to capitalise on the excitement around AI to increase sales of their products following a challenging period.

With its introduction in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT generated a great deal of interest in generative AI in particular—that is, models trained on massive quantities of data that can generate text, graphics, and prompts from user videos. Since then, the excitement surrounding AI has permeated every business and captured the public’s attention.

Viewing an opportunity to profit, smartphone manufacturers will be showcasing their products at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the world’s largest trade event for the mobile sector, which begins on Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

“Nobody wants to be seen as being behind the curve, and AI is just the talk of the town. It is the buzzword this year that all the vendors are going to be jumping on,” Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices research at IDC, said.

What is a phone with artificial intelligence?
It’s more difficult to describe the gear because it varies depending on the manufacturer.
The majority of analysts who talked were interviewed by the media agreed that new gadgets will have more sophisticated chips to run artificial intelligence (AI) programmes, and that those apps will operate locally on the device rather than in the cloud.
Chipsets for smartphones have been introduced by companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek, enabling the computing power needed for AI applications.  

However, AI technology in phones is not new. Some AI-powered functions, including background blur effects on smartphones and picture editing, have been present in devices for years.

Large language models and generative AI are fresh developments. Huge AI models called “large language models,” which are trained on enormous volumes of data, form the foundation for products like the commonly used chatbots. These models open up additional functionality, like chatbots’ capacity to produce text or graphics in response to user input.

“It is not just about having a chatbot, we have had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, it is generative now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. If it is about text to image creation, that was something that wasn’t done before,” Ma said.

The phrase “on-device AI” is another important piece of the smartphone AI puzzle. Previously, a lot of AI apps were downloaded into phones and then partially processed in the cloud. However, more AI applications will probably be performed entirely in the device rather than in a data centre due to improved CPUs and the possibility for huge language models to effectively become smaller.

“I think one of the big stories at MWC will be the ability of the AI models too run natively on the devices themselves and that is where it potentially starts to become a bit more of a gamechanger,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, said.

Android makers claim that on-device Since AI processes data on the device, it increases device security, opens up new applications, and speeds them up.
According to Ma and Wood, this might allow developers to construct new applications.

“Anticipatory computing,” or the notion that artificial intelligence (AI) “is smart enough to learn your behaviour as a user and make the device so much more intuitive and predicting what you want to do next without you having to do much,” is what smartphone makers ultimately hope to accomplish, according to Wood.
But are AI phones available today?
Kind of. While AI has long been included into gadgets, the latest wave of on-device AI with massive language models is still in its infancy.

Many AI-powered features will be on display by device manufacturers at MWC, and some of them are currently available. Samsung touted its AI capabilities while launching its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone line in January. The ability to circle an image or text on any app and instantly search it on Google was one feature that caught people’s attention.
AI feature demonstrations, ranging from smartphone chatbots to camera apps, are probably going to take place at MWC.
However, as IDC’s Ma points out, many of these benefits really rely on cloud processing and are not truly on-device.

It will take a “number of years” before third-party developers find a “killer use case or that compelling use case that consumer can’t do without,” he continued, even with AI capabilities on smartphones.
According to Wood, the risk lies in the fact that producers of smartphones tend to focus more on AI than on the experiences that their products can provide for customers.
“Use cases are necessary to explain AI smartphones to consumers who are unaware of what they are,” stated Wood. There’s a chance that people get “AI fatigue.”
In the end, it may be a while before smartphone makers achieve the grand AI experiences they envision.

“We are building an unbelievable foundational platform for AI on device. 2024 will be the year we look back on and say that’s where it all started to happen but it could be a long time before we start of these benefit of that in terms of game changing experiences,” Wood said.

(Adapted from Barrons.com)

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