Do you have any plans to change an AI mobile phone in 2024? Maybe many people still don’t understand, what is called AI mobile phone and what it can do.
At present, major brands in the market, including OPPO, vivo, Meizu, etc., have begun to push AI mobile phones wildly, and their main functions include AIGC elimination., AI call summaryWait. But don’t worry, the AI snacks pushed by Muji are alive and well, so it’s not too late to buy them later.
Our view is:You don’t have to buy a concept, but you need to see if there is a "truly subversive AI application you need" in your mobile phone.Just don’t buy another Mito phone.
First, the store visited the AI ? ? mobile phone
Beijing East Fourth Ring Road, Huawei, OPPO, vivo and other brand mobile phone stores are lined up. For AI mobile phones, OPPO and vivo should be considered to run faster.
At the OPPO counter, OPPOFind x7 UItra, which was launched in January this year, focuses on the concept of AI mobile phone. What attracts me most are these two functions.
One is the elimination of AIGC. Many people have an annoyance when taking photos in online celebrity scenic spots, that is, "random passers-by". The AIGC elimination function is to identify and eliminate people, objects, etc., and then the AI model that comes with the mobile phone can generate other filling pictures, saving time and effort.
Figure | AIGC elimination demonstrated at OPPO official website
The other is the AI call summary. Presumably, busy modern people have a "common fault". When they hang up a sudden phone call, they completely forget what they just said.
The main function of this function is to intelligently identify the content of the call and generate a summary of key information, so you don’t have to go back and ask and scold repeatedly.
Figure | AI call summary demonstrated on OPPO official website
As for other AI functions, including intelligent generation of pictures, dialogue with smart cloth, intelligent generation of ID photos, etc., it is somewhat similar to Baidu’s Wenxinyige, Siri and Ali’s wonderful duck camera, and the new ideas are not enough for me.
In Taobao’s OPPO flagship store, its AI mobile phone sales currently exceed 10,000+,and the price ranges from 3,999 yuan to 4,999 yuan. In JD.COM, the sales volume of this model is 20,000+.
Compared with OPPO, vivo’s AI mobile phone was launched earlier. Last year, two models, vivo X100 and vivoX100 Pro, were released. Its AI function entrance is mainly based on the small V assistant and jovi voice developed by the big blue heart model. Through this assistant, AI subtitles, screen reading, global translation, listening to songs and recognizing songs can be realized.
One of the functions that impressed me deeply is that in addition to the traditional "voice assistant" function, the small V assistant dialog box has added a creative function-in fact, it is similar to Baidu’s literary mind. As long as you enter a paragraph of text, it can make pictures. It can also take photos in real time and generate photos of various styles. It is said that this creative function can generate documents, PPT and mind maps after upgrading in the future.
Figure | Creation function of Xiao V assistant
The pricing of Vivo X100 and Pro models also ranges from 3,899 yuan to 5,999 yuan. It may have been sold earlier, with X100 selling over 30,000+on Taobao platform and 100,000+on X100 Pro platform.
As for Huawei, the industry believes that Huawei P70 will be the most concerned AI mobile phone in 2024. But according to the latest news, it may be postponed until April.
Seeing that many brands push AI cameras, other consumers in the store with me asked a question: AI mobile phones can generate registration photos, "Is it good, but will the relevant systems recognize the photos generated by AI?"
This little problem has no solution for the time being, but it also brings you a thought:A series of pictures and documents generated by AI also face a series of frictions and adjustments from society, law and ethics.In order to coexist well.
For example, many recent incidents of resurrecting the dead with AI have not been approved and authorized by their families, and curiosity has caused secondary injuries. These AI functions on mobile phones are the same, and they need a lot of discussion from the whole society.
Second, under the AI ? ? mobile phone, some people poured cold water on it.
AI mobile phones are actually not new. They were briefly popular between 2017 and 2018. At that time, manufacturers focused on AI chips, which could run pictures, speech recognition, AI photography and other applications.
HONOR, in that year, launched Glory View 10, with the slogan "Your first AI mobile phone". Now you can also find AI mobile phone articles published in 2018 with titles such as "Counting Huawei’s five AI mobile phones" and "Five AI mobile phones carefully built by Huawei".
However, although manufacturers were excited at that time, consumers seemed to be very calm. The reason was summarized as the lack of epoch-making subversive applications, and the AI concept did not save the global mobile phone from entering the stock market at that time.
In the blink of an eye, six years later, in the second half of last year, AI mobile phones began to move again, this time thanks to the hot generative AI.
In addition to the founders such as Baidu and Ali, mobile phone manufacturers have also refined AI and successively released large models for mobile terminals.
Such as Xiaomi’s MiLM, OPPO’s Andean model, vivo’s blue heart model, Meizu’s Aicy AI, glory’s magic model, Samsung’s Gaussian model, and terminal products equipped with large models.
This year, it seems natural, or it is the industry’s usual "grab the commanding heights". Some mobile phone manufacturers began to call their own mobile phones equipped with large model capabilities "AI mobile phones".
On the occasion of the Lunar New Year in 2024, Liu Zuohu, senior vice president and chief product officer of OPPO, appeared in a promotional video, announcing that "OPPO officially entered the era of AI mobile phones."
Vivo mobile phone also announced that vivo S18 series is "the first batch of AI big model mobile phones in the world", claiming that the self-developed Blue Heart big model has covered its 25 models, and more than 20 million users have experienced the big model function of vivo.
The most radical is Meizu. Before the end of the first month, Meizu suddenly announced that it would stop making "traditional mobile phones", All in AI. The newly released Meizu PRO 21, Meizu officially no longer calls it a mobile phone, but an "open AI terminal".
The drama of AI mobile phone is not only sung by domestic manufacturers.
Samsung also announced its entry into the "new era of mobile AI" with a new generation of Galaxy S24 mobile phones..
Recently, Apple, which has always been cautious, also "abandoned the car to protect AI", disbanded the car-making team that was established for ten years, and instead increased the development of generative AI.
According to many sources, Apple will promote AI capabilities as the focus of the iPhone 16 series. On March 15th, Apple officially announced a series of multi-modal large language models with 30 billion parameters.
Behind the active push of many manufacturers is actually the sense of crisis of mobile phone manufacturers.In doing business, it is important to seize the commanding heights and the right to speak in advance. In 2024, it has become the "first year of AI mobile phone" in the eyes of various manufacturers.
Chen Mingyong, founder and CEO of OPPO, released an internal letter with the theme of "Opening a new era of AI mobile phones" on the first day of the new year on February 18th this year.
Then, Liu Zuohu sounded the alarm for his peers: "In 2024, if smartphone manufacturers don’t lay out large models, there will be no play, which will definitely affect market competitiveness."
Figure | Liu Zuohu’s answer to "Is AI mobile phone a gimmick or a future"
Zhao Ming, CEO of HONOR, said even more seriously that it is too late to be All in AI now: "You will be all in AI this year … The gap will get bigger and bigger."
It seems that the sun is shining, but there are also many boos in the industry.
Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group, bluntly said that "AI mobile phone is a gimmick". For friends who speculate on AI mobile phones, it is inevitable that some people say that AI is a ubiquitous ability. When you can’t feel AI, it is the greatest value of AI. Talking about AI every day shows that there is no AI ability.
Zhao Ming, CEO of Glory, also believes that most friends only tinker with some AI applications, and some slogans such as All in AI are just marketing. Of course, this does not prevent him from thinking that HONOR loaded with MagicOS 8.0 can be defined as a "real AI mobile phone".
Third, how sexy the concept of AI mobile phone is, how skinny the reality is.
Generative AI is indeed becoming the future development direction, so let’s not go against the trend and anti-science. But is the era of AI mobile phones really coming?
Here, let’s return to our original heart and explore what an AI mobile phone is.
The application of AI function modules in mobile phones is nothing new. Many functions in your mobile phone, such as voice assistant, voice recognition, multilingual translation and facial recognition, all use AI. But obviously such a mobile phone is not worthy of being called an "AI mobile phone".
At Gartner, a technology consulting firmIn the definition of "AI mobile phone"Have the software and hardware that can seamlessly integrate and effectively execute the related functions and applications of generative AI. AI mobile phone can run a basic big model that can generate new content, strategies, designs and methods locally. "
That is to say,In industry cognition, AI mobile phones should be able to run the basic big model locally-the end side.Big model.The end-side large model is completely loaded in the mobile phone, and it can be used even in flight mode without connecting to the cloud. The advantages are high speed, low power consumption and low cost, but the disadvantages are also fatal-performance is reduced.
In other words, people are at the machine, and the machine is at the end. The big model is there, and it is on call.
At present, mobile phone manufacturers such as vivo, Samsung, OPPO and Glory have built-in end-to-end models in their mobile phones.
OPPO has a large Andean model with 7 billion parameters at the end; Glory also added a self-developed magic model with 7 billion parameters to MagicOS 8.0 operating system, and vivo also had a blue heart model with 7 billion parameters. Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series also added an end-side model Galaxy AI.
The end-to-end large-scale arms race is in full swing. In the public relations drafts of various companies, their functions are undoubtedly leading and epoch-making. But how sexy the AI mobile phone in the public relations draft is, how skinny the AI mobile phone in reality is.
At present, the main AI functions of the "AI mobile phone" on the market are nothing more than generating graphics and text, intelligent search, picture editing, real-time translation, voice transcription, auxiliary chat, voice assistant and so on. The key point is that these functions can be completed by downloading third-party Apps from the app store without the built-in big model, and the effect is even better than the system itself.
PCHome evaluated mobile phones with large model functions on the access side, such as Meizu 21 PRO, OPPO Find X7 Ultra, vivo X100 Pro, and frequently overturned when trying related functions.
For example, ask Aicy voice assistant of Meizu mobile phone "When will Meizu mobile phone support AI", and it only answers the current date;
Let the small cloth assistant of OPPO mobile phone draw "to divert the tiger away from the mountain", it can only draw a tiger. The image generation function of vivo X100 Pro is single in style and uneven in quality, which is not as good as the free AI image generation tool on the market.
In the cross review of another AI mobile phone, the image editing function promoted by an AI mobile phone can’t compliment the effect of removing redundant characters with one click, and the afterimage is very obvious. What’s more, for most users, this function may not even be as practical as the one-click beauty of Meitu Xiu Xiu or Tik Tok Filter.
To sum up, even the standard basic skills of large models on the market are not up to standard, not to mention the higher-level AI functions mentioned in the publicity.
This can’t help but remind people of the Mito mobile phone that came out in 2013. Although it is not the same species as AI mobile phone, its main function can be realized by downloading a Mito Xiu Xiu. Why buy a new mobile phone?
Remembered that sentence, "the business ability is not enough, and it is easy to be optimized in the workplace."
Fourth, the AI ? ? mobile phone must be in the sky, and there are three mountains.
As a family, the current mobile phone is still far away from the real AI mobile phone era. In order to climb the top of AI, the mobile phone industry still needs to cross three mountains-innovation is not subversive, hardware is not up to standard, and the audience can’t buy it, so it is possible to enter the era of AI mobile phones.
First of all, is there any subversive innovation in the first mountain? Subversive innovation means drastic changes in product forms and user habits.
In the field of personal computers, from the command line interface to the graphical interface, the way people use computers has changed from typing codes on the keyboard to controlling the interface at will with the mouse. In the field of mobile phones, functional machines have been transformed into smart phones, and the way people use mobile phones has changed from keyboards to touch screens.
In the era of AI mobile phones, at least there must be similar revolutionary innovations.
For example, from a graphical user interfaceBecome a natural language user interfacePeople use dialogue to control their mobile phones; Or, the generative AI completely breaks the barrier between the mobile App and various functions. Or, a phenomenal end-to-end model similar to Android or iOS appears and becomes the underlying architecture of mobile phones …
We are not a prophet, and we don’t know what kind of subversive change it is, but we know that the current AI mobile phone is definitely not. Generative AI can indeed improve the efficiency of some office, study and living abilities on mobile phones, but it is not qualified to become a subversive innovation that promotes intergenerational change, and there is still a long way to go.
This involvesThe second mountain on the AI ? ? mobile phone, the hardware ceiling.
Full-scale models such as ChatGPT and ERNIE Bot work miracles by themselves, and the process of training and using consumes huge computing power and electricity.
It is said that the training of GPT-4 used 1 ~ 25,000 A100 chips. Musk, the cross-border richest man who has been paying close attention to generative AI, also estimated that GPT-5 may need 30,000 to 50,000 H100. The domestic Wenxin Big Model 4.0 was also trained with Baidu’s own flying paddle platform Wanka Cluster.
After opening the service to the public, in order to meet the simultaneous use of a large number of users, strong hardware support is also needed. It is estimated that ChatGPT needs to use 30,000 GPUs to deal with millions of user requests every day.
Such a huge demand for computing power directly pushed the share price of NVIDIA, which sells shovels, up to $2 trillion at one time, surpassing Google and Amazon and ranking third in the US stock market.
The big model is still a fierce electric tiger. A few days ago, a piece of news rushed to Weibo for hot search: the daily power consumption of ChatGPT is equal to that of 17,000 households in the United States. The average daily electricity consumption of an American family is 29 kWh, while the daily electricity consumption of ChatGPT exceeds 500,000 kWh.
With the current mobile phone hardware foundation, it is really hard to bear the "big" of the big model, and it needs to be optimized specifically for mobile phones.
Since the second half of last year, Qualcomm, MediaTek and other chip manufacturers have frequently made efforts to develop large-scale end-to-end hardware.
In October 2023, Qualcomm released the first Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip specially built for generative AI, which can run a large model with 10 billion parameters on mobile phones. Glory Magic6 Pro, Xiaomi 14 Pro, OPPO Find X7 Ultra and other mobile phones use this chip. MediaTek released Tianji 9300 chip at the end of 2023, claiming to support a large model with a maximum of 33 billion parameters.
Figure | Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3
The A100 chip running GPT has a memory of 80G, and no matter how many mobile phones are configured, it is not enough.
For example, the newly launched GeForce RTX 40 Super in NVIDIA has an AI engine power of 836 TOPS per second. In contrast, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen3, the strongest mobile phone terminal, has only 73 TOPS per second, a difference of more than ten times.
So,Full-scale cloud model, the mobile phone can’t move locally.At present, the large-scale end-to-end model, with parameters ranging from tens to tens of billions, is small and exquisite compared with the large-scale cloud model with hundreds or even trillions of dollars.
The most common way to experience the most advanced generative AI on the mobile phone is through the cloud, where users input instructions on the mobile phone, then upload them to the cloud for processing and then return them to the mobile phone. This process is time-consuming and laborious, and subject to the network, the experience is not very friendly.
To experience a more silky large model on a mobile phone, a specially optimized end-to-end large model is needed, which will inevitably shrink in performance.
Even the full-scale cloud model is not mature enough, and all kinds of hallucinations and bugs often appear. The scaled-down end-to-end model will naturally seriously restrict the performance on the AI ? ? mobile phone.
Even if it is immature, it must be hard. In addition to occupying a position in publicity, mobile phone manufacturers have a more practical purpose: to promote mobile phone sales through the gimmick of AI.
But this will encounterThe third mountain that blocks AI mobile phones: the audience may not buy it.
The background is that the economy is going down and the sales of mobile phones are declining. According to International Data CorporationIn 2023, China’s smartphone shipments were about 271 million units, down 5% year-on-year, the lowest in nearly a decade.
In 2024, the situation did not improve. According to the research organization Counterpoint Research, the sales volume of smart phones in China dropped by 7% in the first six weeks of 2024, and the sales volume of most mainstream mobile phone manufacturers showed a large-scale decline, among which OPPO fell by 29%, Apple fell by 24%, vivo fell by 15%, and Xiaomi fell by 7%. Only Huawei and Glory achieved growth.
In terms of camera, size, chip, battery, screen and other mobile phone software and hardware parameters, mobile phone manufacturers have no volume, and consumers who have tightened their pockets have long been less cold. So mobile phone manufacturers regard generative AI as the next lifeline.
But the cold reality is that consumers don’t buy the AI ? ? pie painted by mobile phone manufacturers, at least for now.
I visited the official flagship stores of OPPO and vivo near the East Fourth Ring Road in Beijing offline, and found that the AI ? ? mobile phone is actually not the focus of publicity. The clerk of the mobile phone shop also said that customers are still mainly concerned about the performance of mobile phones such as taking photos, chips and screens, and few people will take the initiative to pay attention to the AI function. Even if the clerk takes the initiative to mention it, he is usually not interested. Offline interviews with media such as Economic Observer and Titanium Media also received similar feedback.
It is well understood that compared with the stars and seas where people in the industry are keen to discuss AI technology, ordinary consumers are more concerned about: Is AI on mobile phones really that powerful? Judging from the capabilities provided by the current AI mobile phone, the answer may not be.
Five, AI mobile phone, why is it a mobile phone, the brain hole can be bigger.
Past experience tells us that it is not the faster carriage that defeats the carriage, but the car;Similarly, why is it a stronger mobile phone instead of a smart phone?
It is entirely possible that it is another form of AI hardware, replacing the smart phone form that has been popular for more than ten years. Recently, there have been several products that have broken through the boundaries of smart phones, which have aroused widespread concern.
For example, Rabbit, an AI company, has launched a palm-sized smart device, Rabbit R1, which is mainly driven by natural language. Press the dialogue button and you will get a response within 500 milliseconds. This equipment sold 50,000 units in two weeks.
Humane, a startup company, has released a product AI Pin embedded with OpenAI technology, which removes the screen and relies on laser projection and gestures to operate. Time magazine named this AI hardware as "one of the top 200 inventions in 2023".
Figure | AI hardware AI Pin operated by projection and gesture
Deutsche Telekom and Brain.ai jointly launched a product called T-Mobile, which is characterized by no App, and the main interface is an AI assistant, which is controlled through dialogue.
Of course, these devices are still in the development state more or less, and it is still early to put them into the market on a large scale.
Although the generative AI in sturm und drang in the past year, there was even a phenomenon of "big satellite release", and people kept announcing that their large-scale model capabilities "caught up" or even "surpassed" GPT3.5 or even 4. But so far, apart from ChatGPT itself, there is no phenomenal AI application for all.
In other words, the applied ecology on the basic big model is still in its infancy, and how big the fruits of the big model can be, depends on nature. However, the ability of the end-side large model carried by the mobile phone is always locked by the basic large model. In this case,Advocating AI mobile phones is more of a public relations technique.
The turning point of domestic AI mobile phones may have to wait until the international head model company opens its own products.
Filter more thoroughly and breathe more freely.
