Remember when a smartphone was smart enough? Not so in 2024 where the new state of the art for mobile innovation is artificial intelligence and we'll all be introduced to AI Phones.
The term will be inescapable starting in early 2024 when Samsung is expected to unveil its Galaxy S24 line, which it's already actively branding as an "AI Phone". The company has gone so far as trademarking the term in the European Union and UK. I like how it's trying to ignore that Google introduced its own "AI Phone" with October's Pixel 8 launch.
To appreciate why 2024 will be the year of the AI Phone, though, we need to understand what the heck the leading phone manufacturers mean by the term and how we got here.
Artificial Intelligence is not just smarts or automation, it's a leap. In general, AI is trained and can make logical leaps based on that training. It can, for instance, identify a tree or a dog because it was shown (or trained on) millions of images of trees and dogs and now the AI knows what they look like.
The AI chatbots you love using, like ChatGPT and Bard, know how to construct human-like sentences because they've been trained on billions of bits of word data and can accurately predict which words should come next in a sentence, especially based on the context. This extends beyond words to images where image training allows generative AI to construct new images based on what the AI understands from the millions of images it has seen across the internet (even if it still fails to understand that the human hand has five fingers).
You get an AI Phone, and you get an AI Phone, and you...
An AI Phone, as imagined by, say, Samsung which plans to sell you one, and Qualcomm, which is building the chips (Snapdragon 8 Gen 3) inside most Android AI-grade smartphones (including probably, the upcoming S24 line), is a smartphone that can perform many of the same tricks ChatGPT, Bard, DALL-E2 and other generative systems can, but – usually – on-device.
Sounds exciting, right? And it is but I am a little concerned that some people will believe that artificial intelligence is new to smartphones. The reality is we've seen chips and 'engines' with neural processing capabilities and on-board machine learning for years.
Six years ago, Apple introduced its game-changing iPhone X and its A11 Bionic chip, a bit of in-house designed silicon notable for the introduction of the Neural Engine and on-board machine learning. Back in 2017 Apple's senior vice president of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji explained to me how Apple had already been working on the technology for years: "The neural engine embed, it’s a bet we made three years ahead.” Srouji detailed how these early iterations were focused, in part, on efficiency. "...for these neural networking kinds of programming models, implementing custom silicon that’s targeted for that application, that will perform the exact same tasks, is much more energy efficient than a graphics engine."
Fast-forward to 2023 when Apple unveiled its iPhone 15 Pro and the new A17 Pro, a chip that offers AI processing magnitudes more powerful than the Neural Engine found in the iPhone X.
Similarly, even as Samsung touts an upcoming AI phone, the foundation of it, which likely starts with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 G3, goes back to at least 2017 when Qualcomm introduced neural processing to the Snapdragon 845.
Google's Tensor chips introduced machine learning and computational photography skills to Pixel 6 phones in 2021.
My point is that as we talk about the leaps Samsung, Qualcomm, Google, and myriad Android partners are making in the AI space in 2024, it's worth remembering that most of them have been tapping into AI-centric tech and features for years.
However, it's also worth noting that the use of AI in smartphones has mostly been supportive, in that neural processing units on chips would help power features like on-device translation, voice and image recognition with feature like the Google Lens, and virtual assistants such as Siri and the Google Assistant. In contrast, 2023 marks a move to generative AI, with the smart tech actually serving up content and more actively aiding phone users, say generating images and itineraries for them or drafting responses to emails.
Taking the local AI
With some parity among AI capabilities across these major phone manufacturers, I would not expect anyone to switch platforms or handsets solely for these cool AI abilities. It may all boil down to what it usually does, core features that matter to you and then, perhaps, which are enabled by next-gen AI capabilities.
For most Android phone owners upgrading next year, they may find that more of their AI experience is possible onboard, as opposed to happening with the help of the cloud.
Plus the differences between Apple's AI and, say, Samsung's, at least before Apple's next big iPhone launch in the fall, might become more stark. Apple lacks some of the showier on-board generative AI tricks (no, Siri does not count) we've already seen in, for instance, another AI Phone pioneer: Google.
When Google unveiled its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones, it also unveiled the new Tensor G3 SoC which includes on-board AI that powers numerous AI tricks like the Magic Editor that lets you move people and objects in photos and replace them with the proper background or the Best Shot that takes multiple headshots to find the best expression for one photo. While Google is not new to mobile AI, this is its most aggressive push on the mobile level and naturally, the first time it's called a new Pixel phone an "AI Phone."
Google, though, is a bit of an outlier here in that its ability to achieve some of its best AI feats is dependent on a cloud connection.
The expectation in 2024, though, is that Google will continue to expand onboard Pixel 8 AI capabilities and that Android phones powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will also introduce powerful on-board generative AI.
Perhaps, the trend in 2024 should not be called AI Phone but "Local AI Phone." Again, Apple has generally done all its machine learning locally, but usually for under-the-hood capabilities.
On the Android front, a new generation of silicon will match those local capabilities to enable forward-facing abilities in text, video, images, and even audio. Google may be under pressure in the new year, though, to put all its exciting photo and video AI enhancement abilities on device only.
My point is that you will hear the term "AI Phone" a lot in 2024. It doesn't mean that your entire experience will change or even that the potential Samsung Galaxy S24, Apple iPhone 16, or Google Pixel 9 will be fundamentally different from a garden variety smartphone. They will offer more cool tricks but they will still be phones. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
