Samsung has been trying to make Bixby a thing for almost eight years now, with absolutely no success whatsoever. Alexa and Siri may be household names, but Bixby has long been considered something of a joke at best. That doesn’t seem to be stopping Samsung from trying to promote its assistant to the big leagues with AI.
We’ve long heard rumors Samsung could be readying a substantial AI upgrade to Bixby, which would put it on par with ChatGPT and Google Gemini rather than Alexa or Google Assistant. According to a new report from ET News, the first AI upgrades could be arriving alongside the Samsung Galaxy S25 early next year.
Apparently Samsung has prepared Large Language Model (LLM) support for Bixby, which has already been released without fanfare in China on the Galaxy Tab S10. The report also claims that the upgrade was originally intended for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6, but scheduling issues forced a delay .
ET News claims that Bixby’s LLM will be powered by the Samsung Gauss model alongside Google Gemini. Meanwhile the Chinese model supposedly uses Gauss with a Chinese LLM — meaning the experience of using the two may be totally different.
Adding LLM support should make Bixby more powerful, allowing the assistant to become more conversational and to offer better answers. Other features may also include things like image generation, which have become a staple feature on chatbots and other AI software over the past year. The fact the LLM will reportedly take advantage of Google Gemini could give us an idea of what to expect.
Whether that will actually make people care about Bixby is another matter. Samsung hasn’t had much success getting users to treat Bixby as anything more than bloatware over the years, even back in the days when it was pushing Bixby really hard. Considering there’s already so much popular competition in the AI market, including the Samsung-compatible Google Gemini, I doubt it’s going to be an easy task.
Still, leaker Ice Universe believes that the new Bixby will be “the biggest selling point” for the Galaxy S25. We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens once the Galaxy S25’s launch event actually rolls around. The next Galaxy Unpacked is expected to take place on January 23, which is where we’ll see our first official look at the Galaxy S25 and the final version of One UI 7 — Samsung’s take on Android 15.
