One day, our phones might not be phones at all. They'll just be a gateway to AI in the cloud, and we won't need to keep upgrading them or carrying them around. That's the future as some people see coming.
The age of AI-powered smartphones is already here.
Apple's
Worldwide Developers Conference next week is expected to showcase some new AI
features for its upcoming iOS 18. And there's a good chance we'll see something
called Apple-GPT (which, by the way, won't be called Apple-GPT). This chatbot,
based on an LLM model, could be built right into Siri or offered as a
standalone app.
The
latest iPhones already have the Apple A17 Pro chip, which lets them do AI
stuff. And other companies are working on their own AI-powered phones, too.
According to a report from Canalys, 16% of smartphones shipped in 2022 had AI
features, and that number is expected to jump to 54% by 2028.
Some
of the biggest phone makers are already pushing AI-powered phones:
Samsung:
Their Galaxy S24 series has AI features like Live Translate, Circle to Search,
and AI-enhanced camera tools.
Google:
The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro have AI tricks like Magic Editor and Best Take,
plus on-device generative AI with their Gemini model.
Xiaomi:
The Xiaomi 14 series has AI features for stuff like portrait shots and fancy
photography modes.
Motorola:
The Moto Edge 50 series has AI tricks like Generative Wallpapers and AI-powered
camera helpers like Adaptive Stabilization and Magic Eraser.
Asus:
The Zenfone 11 Ultra has AI tricks for live translation, noise cancellation,
and even making its own wallpapers.
And
don't even get me started on all the startups and new companies working on AI
phones. At Mobile World Congress 2024, there was this company called Telekom
showing off a concept phone that doesn't need regular smartphone apps. Instead,
it uses AI to do things like predict what you want to do and make interfaces
for that. It's not clear how well that'll work with the current state of AI,
but it's an interesting idea.
So,
the future of AI and smartphones might not be as clear-cut as some people
think. But one thing's for sure: AI is going to change the way we use our
phones, and maybe even make them obsolete.
How phones
will fork
It’s
likely that AI features will divide the market into two increasingly distant
categories.
Smartphone makers like Apple will push privacy-focused AI
processing on a chip inside the phone, which will initially incentivize
upgrading to newer and more powerful (and more expensive) hardware. A new
generation of high-end AI phones will offer super-fast connectivity and huge
memory. They’ll be able to cache streams of video for video-inclusive
multimodal AI.
The “Generative AI Phone Industry Whitepaper,”
jointly released by Counterpoint Research and MediaTek, forecasts that a
billion high-end AI smartphones will exist by 2027. (Note that MediaTek is a
fabless semiconductor company with a strong business interest in the future of
smartphone hardware.)
But
budget-minded phone makers will focus on using the phone only for its camera
and connectivity, dumbing down the chips (and thus driving down the cost) and
accessing AI in the cloud.
How AI will kill the smartphone
Smartphone
companies will roll out a host of new AI features, and I think they’ll prove
popular. AI will not only bring ChatGPT-like answers, but also greater
personalization, better performance, stronger privacy and security, better
battery life, more useful health monitoring, more options for creative
expression, especially in photo apps, and eventually even lower prices.
Budget
smartphone buyers will love the features, plus the low cost, of cloud-AI
phones. In both cases, AI will
probably become the dominant feature and the main interface that people will
use. AI usage encourages voice in both directions — we’ll talk to AI through
our phones, and AI will talk back. Or AI will harvest video, audio, and text and
give us information by talking or showing words and pictures on the phone.
But
here’s why this outcome means trouble for the smartphone hardware industry. The great thing about AI is that it’s
software-upgradable. When you buy a phone, the phone gets better mainly through
software updates, not hardware updates. It will become increasingly difficult
for companies like Apple to convince buyers to shell out $1,000 for a new phone
every couple of years when the features they prize most are upgradable with
changes to cloud services or with software updates to the phone.
AI also changes how
we interact with our gadgets, man. We'll be using earbuds and, soon enough, AI
glasses to talk to chatbots and stuff. The glasses will have cameras to take
pics and vids, too.
As glasses become
the main way we talk to AI, the experience is only gonna get better. Better
glasses (not phones, man) with better light engines, speakers, mics, batteries,
lenses, and antennas. And as everything gets smaller, there'll be a new kind of
AI phone that doesn't need to be tethered to your smartphone at all. All the
smarts will be in the glasses themselves.
Smartphones will be
around for a while, but we're gonna see some wild wearables, too. Better
smartwatches, AI-powered earbuds, and even AI for your car's windshield. But I
think AI glasses are gonna be the big game-changer. They can put speakers right
next to your ears, hands-free mics near your mouth, and a screen right in front
of your eyes. Plus, you can wear them all day, every day, without anything in
your ear canals. Like, four billion people already wear glasses every day! It's
not a big jump to add AI to that.
The AI glasses
revolution is coming, man. It's only a few years away, but when it does, people
are gonna love it. Companies like Apple and Google are all over the patents for
the tech that's gonna make it happen, and it's only a matter of time before they're
on every face.
In the end, AI
software is gonna take over everything. It already is, man. But this decade,
it's AI software in our glasses that's really gonna change the game. And it's
only a matter of time before AI software replaces smartphones, too. The future
is here, dude. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
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