Not long ago,SamsungReleased the new generation flagship device Galaxy S24 series, including Galaxy S24, Galaxy S24+ and Galaxy S24Ultra.
As the king of Android phones, the Galaxy S24 series all use a customized version of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen3 Galaxy processor, and the starting prices of the Pioneer Edition in China are 5,999 yuan, 7,499 yuan, and 10,199 yuan respectively.
Samsung did not introduce too much hardware parameters this time, but instead emphasized "AI Phone” concept, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will become an indispensable element of long-term product strategy.
Not only Samsung, but also the smartphone industry is seeing AI being mentioned more and more frequently.Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, Honor and other new phones all involve AI functions to a greater or lesser extent.
Will 2024 be the first year of AI mobile phones?
Introducing generative AI will be a must
The concept of “the first year of AI mobile phone” has begun to be hyped a lot.
In an interview with the media, Cristiano Amon, president and CEO of Qualcomm, said that 2024 will be the first year of AI mobile phones worldwide, and generative AI is entering mobile phones "very quickly."
At the same time, Canalys predicts that by 2024, 5% of smartphone shipments will be AI phones, and by 2027, this proportion will rise to 45%.
Samsung is currently the top 2 in the global market.appleWhile the company and Cook ignore AI, Samsung sees AI as the key trump card to surpass Apple.
As early as mid-2023, Samsung took the lead in proposing the concept of "AI large-scale mobile phone" and continued to promote it in the media, and even made a bold statement in the Western market: Samsung Galaxy S24 will become the world'sFirstAn “AI big model phone”.
However, the Galaxy S24 has not yet been seen, and the Huawei MATE60 series has already been equipped with the self-developed Pangu large model, becoming theFirstAn “AI big model phone”.
Although it was several months late, I lost "FirstDespite the hype of "making the first AI phone", Samsung still regards AI as the core selling point of the Galaxy S24 series. At the end of 2023, it officially announced its self-developed generative AI product Gauss (Gaussian) large model. It launched three AI applications, Language, Code and Image, to help users process text, write code and generate images.
However, in the newly released Galaxy S24 series, Samsung did not use its own Gauss large model. Instead, it cooperated with Google to pre-install Google Cloud's Gemini AI model on the Galaxy S24 series of mobile phones.
According to Samsung, the Galaxy S24 series uses Google's AI infrastructure (including Imagen2, Gemini Pro and Nano LLM), enabling Android developers to quickly deploy creative hybrid AI functions. At the same time, it seamlessly integrates various Google applications such as Android Auto, Google Maps, etc.
In addition to Google applications, Samsung Galaxy AI functions will also support video AI processing, local AI chatbots, image processing, real-time call translation, etc.
At the same time, using AI big models on mobile phones can also provide Samsung with additional income. After all, the membership fee of AI big models is the core source of income for AI big models. The most popular ChatGPT Plus membership on the market costs $19.9/month, and Google Gemini Pro costs $0.00025 per thousand characters, $0.0025 per picture, and $0.0005 per thousand characters output.
According to information revealed on Samsung's official website, Samsung's current plan is to provide Galaxy AI functions for free on supported devices before the end of 2025, and will charge for AI functions later.
"Galaxy AI is coming" is the poster of Samsung's new product promotional video, showing its ambition to occupy the high ground in the terminal AI war.
On the one hand, the Galaxy AI function can provide new ways to innovate products and achieve market differentiation against its direct competitor Apple; on the other hand, the AI function can be charged in the future to increase additional revenue.
For Samsung, embedding AI functions into mobile phones is a must.
Chinese manufacturers have never been absent from AI
Although Samsung has been hyping up the concept of the first year of AI mobile phones by leveraging its brand influence in the international market,FirstHuawei is still the first brand to launch AI mobile phones. Even after Huawei, there are still a steady stream of domestic mobile phone brands launching new phones with AI functions.
Chinese manufacturers have never been absent from the AI wave.
The Pangu big model equipped in the Huawei Mate60 series is equipped with a new generation of NPU (neural network processor), which can directly use the AI big model in the Huawei cloud to enhance the image quality of local photos on the mobile phone. In addition to color and light and shadow, "AI cloud enhancement" can also significantly improve the clarity of photos, making it reach an amazing 8K quality.
Xiaomi Mi 14 is equipped with Xiaomi's self-developed 6 billion parameter-level large model, which can perform "text image", "AI image expansion" and "AI removal of passers-by" offline on the phone. The AI large model is also deeply integrated into Xiaomi Pengpai OS. At present, it has built a number of generative AI capabilities and can directly run the terminal-side large model locally.
At the same time, on January 30, Xiao Ai posted on Weibo that Xiao Ai's AI assistant has passed the large model registration, and more friends will be able to experience the charm of Xiao Ai's large model in the future.
It is reported that based on Xiaomi's hardware ecosystem and massive data, Xiao Ai can provide users with complete AI technology services such as leading voice recognition and NLP (natural language recognition).
Xiao Ai classmate Weibo
Not only Huawei and Xiaomi, but also vivo and OPPO, which are jokingly called the "blue and green factories", have successively launched the Blue Heart Big Model and Andes Big Model (AndesGPT), which are directly connected to their self-developed systems OriginOS4.0 and ColorOS14.
At present, vivo's Blue Heart Big Model supports 5 models with three parameter scales: billion, tens of billions, and hundreds of billions, covering all core scenarios; OPPO's Andes Big Model supports models with multiple parameter scales from 1 billion to hundreds of billions, and achieves the effect of collaborative operation between local and cloud through the "end-cloud collaboration" architecture.
Even Honor announced MagicOS8.0's new interactive function "Anywhere Door" based on platform-level AI. At the Honor Developer Conference in mid-January, it launched the new MagicOS8.0 system and the self-developed end-side 7B (7 billion parameter scale) large model "Magic Big Model".
It can be said that the "boarding" of AI functions has become a mainstream development trend in the domestic mobile phone market. According to IDC's forecast, by 2026, nearly 50% of terminal device processors in the Chinese market will have AI technology.
The AI function is more like a timely rain for domestic mobile phone brands, because smartphones have evolved too quickly in the past decade. After various brands rolled out processors, they also rolled out screens, images, and memory. As a result, the mobile phone industry has not seen any eye-catching disruptive innovations in recent years.
According to Cristiano Amon, devices equipped with multiple AI application cases will be available on the market in early 2024, which may create a new smartphone upgrade cycle and prompt consumers to replace their phones to obtain these new features.
The emergence of AI has given domestic mobile phone brands a new direction.
As for Samsung, it is a real latecomer in the field of AI mobile phones.
SoC is still a problem
Although AI mobile phones are emerging in large numbers and various brands have begun to make efforts together, smartphones, as mobile portable devices, have too many performance limitations and it is difficult to support the operation of AI functions.
AI requires huge computing power, which not only has high requirements for applications, but also for hardware. Currently, chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Samsung have focused on strengthening SoC.
For example, the total computing power of Qualcomm Snapdragon 8Gen3's AI engine has nearly doubled compared to the previous generation, while MediaTek Dimensity 9300's integer and floating-point performance have both doubled compared to the previous generation, and its operator acceleration performance has reached 8 times that of the previous generation.
It is worth mentioning that due to the limitations of the current 3nm technology and mobile processors, Qualcomm has not launched dedicated units specific to AI computing. Instead, they have unified the design of higher operating frequencies, larger caches, and faster memory bandwidth to improve the performance of NPU (neural network processing unit) and TPU (tensor processing unit) in processing AI tasks.
The ability to run large models or other generative AI models on the edge has now become a must. Only by maintaining a certain speed threshold can the real-time performance of AI operations be ensured.
In the first year of AI mobile phones, there is still a lack of a SoC that can break through and go online.Apple, a leader in chip design, has not yet focused on AI capabilities.
It is reported that Apple is already developing a large AI model, code-named Ajax, which is called Apple GPT internally. Apple GPT, which has 200 billion parameters, may be similar to OpenAI.up to dateThe performance of the large model is comparable to that of Apple's large model, and it is considered to be the core of Apple's "family bucket" and even the transformation of the entire ecosystem from mobile phones to cars.
According to The Information, Apple plans to integrate large language models into Siri, allowing users to automatically perform complex tasks. This feature will be more deeply integrated with the Shortcuts app. It will enhance the ability of Siri and Messages apps in question-answering and auto-complete sentences.
AI features are expected to appear in an iPhone software update released in 2024, most likely with iOS 18.
It can be seen that in the AI era, no major Internet company can ignore it. Even Apple has to follow the pace of the Android camp and add AI to its own ecosystem.
Perhaps, only when the iPhone joins can it truly be called the "first year of AI mobile phones", otherwise it can only be regarded as a collective carnival in the Android camp.