Samsung Electronics’ flagship smartphone “Galaxy S24” series will be exhibited at an announcement ceremony in Seoul, South Korea on January 15, 2024.
Kim Hong-ji | Reuters
Samsung, Google, Chinese company Honor and others are powering their latest devices with AI-powered capabilities to translate and summarize conversations, take and edit photos, and more with the power of generative AI algorithms. It’s one of the companies.
These are algorithms that are built into the device’s chip itself, rather than being accessed via the cloud.
Samsung is going big on generative AI with its Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphone.
Google has also integrated AI directly into its latest Pixel smartphones.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reports that Apple is also considering adding on-device AI capabilities to its next iPhone.
All of this comes as Mobile World Congress, the mobile technology industry’s biggest trade show of the year, kicks off.
Major device makers such as Samsung, Huawei, Honor and Oppo, as well as chip companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek, are expected to make big statements about the extent to which AI will transform our personal devices. .
Smartphone makers have been dreaming of an AI-driven industry “supercycle” after years of sharply slowing device sales.
Smartphone sales in 2023 will decline to 1.16 billion units, the lowest shipment volume in the past 10 years.
The last smartphone “supercycle” occurred between 2010 and 2015, when the market grew five-fold in five years, from about 300 million units a year to 1.5 billion units, according to IDC data.
It happened at a time when smartphones were just beginning to become mainstream with the advent of widely used applications such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, and Candy Crush Saga.
“This growth is not just because Apple launched the iPhone or Google launched Android,” Francisco Geronimo, vice president of data and analytics at research firm IDC, told CNBC.
“What really made that supercycle successful was the fact that it put the Internet in people’s pockets,” Geronimo said in a phone interview with CNBC.
There were other things going on at the time, including the ability to make video calls over the internet on 3G and the move to 4G, which meant faster speeds.
“We’ve seen not only browsers, but also very popular operating systems, but also a world of applications that provide so many services and content through the phone,” Geronimo said.
Ben Wood, principal analyst at CCS Insight, said the iPhone announcement was the last “seismic disruption” to occur in the industry.
“Since then, there hasn’t been as much disruption,” Wood told CNBC.
Big smartphone companies are betting that a supercycle is about to happen, thanks to AI.
Samsung, which launched the Galaxy S24 Ultra earlier this year, believes AI is likely to usher in a new dawn that will breathe new life into the industry.
James Kitto, Samsung’s head of UK mobile experience, told CNBC that the mobile industry is at the beginning of a new era of AI-driven hypergrowth.
“Every expectation is that this will happen, and we’re seeing very high demand,” Kitto told CNBC from Samsung’s European headquarters in Chertsey, England.
The Galaxy S24 featured the ability to circle objects on the camera to display Google search results, as well as live translation for calls to people speaking in a foreign language.
“We are now at the dawn of a whole new era, the era of AI telephony,” Kitto said.
Brian Rakowski, Google’s vice president of product management for Pixel phones, said he expects AI to drive renewed interest in mobile technology.
Google has been working on integrating AI into its devices for years, most notably with the addition of its Tensor series of smartphone processors.
“We were already seeing AI becoming a differentiator and the next wave of innovation in all technologies, especially mobile,” Rakowski told CNBC. “This is so important to all of our computing lives and computing platforms.”
Google recently made it possible to run its Gemini nano AI system on its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). It is a smaller version of a larger family of language models under the umbrella name Gemini.
Rakowski said Google plans to release a more advanced version of Gemini on Android next year.
“We are making a lot of bets and are working very closely with the research team. [AI lab] DeepMind is showcasing what’s coming and making sure Pixel is the best way to bring it to the surface,” Rakowski said.
“No one knew that LLM would get attention, but we were hoping for a breakthrough in this field,” he added.
Analysts say a supercycle is unlikely in the next few years because there aren’t enough new features or innovations happening in the market to convince people with aging smartphones to upgrade. It has said.
According to IDC, sales are expected to grow this year, with smartphone shipments expected to increase by 2.4% this year to 1.19 billion units by 2024. However, this is a low level and indicates lackluster growth for the industry as a whole.
Growth is expected to be sluggish in the coming years, with IDC forecasting gradual increases of 2% to 3% year over year from 2025 to 2028.
Consumers remain wary of potential smartphone upgrades today as the price of upgrades continues to rise.
Moreover, many of the newer models that are coming out are still just touting incremental improvements over previous models.
“While the potential for AI in smartphones is an exciting prospect, we do not believe this technology will contribute to another supercycle in smartphone sales,” Wood told CNBC via email.
“At best, it will help maintain sales and generate a little more interest in smartphones as the hardware becomes increasingly boring.”
Right now, there isn’t enough excitement around smartphones on a broad level to justify the sales boom that many companies dream of.
According to Geronimo, this will change in the coming years, but only as artificial intelligence becomes more useful to consumers.
“If there’s anything I can do, [a supercycle] “If it were to happen, it would be AI. But in the case of AI, there are question marks about how intelligent the phone will be,” Geronimo said.
Current smartphones are “not intelligent,” he added.
“What do you do when you see a billboard for the latest Tarantino movie or a Mission: Impossible movie? Open the app, book your ticket on that app, text your wife, text her where she wants to go. Send us a message and use our calendar app to check the best days to go to the movies.”
Many companies are working on technology that can do just this.
For example, Humane has AI Pin, a compact, square device that users can talk to and ask to perform a specific task, such as setting a reminder. This uses OpenAI’s large-scale language models.
Another startup, Rabbit, has a similar device. Meanwhile, Geely-owned Meizu recently announced that it would give up making Android smartphones and develop hardware products with a focus on AI.
