The age of consumer-focused AI is officially upon us. After Honor last month announced that its upcoming Magic 6 smartphone will use an on-device large language model (LLM) to “usher in a new era of generative AI,” Samsung has now revealed plans for its own take on ChatGPT-style virtual assistance: Samsung Gauss.
At the company’s July Unpacked Event, Samsung executive Junho Park told us that Samsung was "deeply developing" ways of integrating generative AI into the best Samsung phones, and Samsung Gauss – which, according to a Korea Times report, will make its debut in the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S24 – is the product of that development.
Per Samsung’s own description, Samsung Gauss is an on-device LLM made up of three parts: Samsung Gauss Language, Samsung Gauss Code and Samsung Gauss Image. The model is named after legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, and is intended to reflect Samsung’s overall vision: “to draw from all the phenomena and knowledge in the world in order to harness the power of AI to improve the lives of consumers everywhere.” Talk about being bold.
But how might Samsung Gauss actually improve the functionality of Samsung’s upcoming devices? Well, Samsung has been kind enough to break down each of those aforementioned key components for us.
Samsung Gauss Language, for instance, “enhances work efficiency by facilitating tasks such as composing emails, summarizing documents and translating content. It can also enhance the consumer experience by enabling smarter device control when integrated into products.”
Samsung Gauss Code is “optimized for in-house software development, allowing developers to code easily and quickly. It also supports functions such as code description and test case generation through an interactive interface.”
And lastly, Samsung Gauss Image is a “generative image model that can easily generate and edit creative images, including style changes and additions, while also converting low-resolution images to high-resolution.”
As expected, these AI-powered functions sound similar to the sort of functions Honor has touted for its own LLM – offline virtual assistance, image generation, and so on – but crucially, Samsung Gauss doesn’t seem tied to Qualcomm’s newly announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset in quite the same way.
Where Honor has publicly partnered with Qualcomm to bring useful AI features to future Honor devices, Samsung appears to be pressing ahead with its own proprietary technology. This suggests that the benefits of Samsung Gauss may not be limited to upcoming Samsung devices running Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, exclusively.
In any case, the advent of Samsung Gauss will presumably provide a big boost to the appeal of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S24 range, which is widely expected to launch in January 2024. Your move, Apple.
