AI large models are accelerating to mobile phones, and a new round of technology competition has opened again

Reporter: Wang Jing Editor: Wen Duo

At the beginning of 2023, with the explosion of ChatGPT, many technology companies have launched large-scale model-related products. Mobile phone manufacturers such as vivo and Xiaomi have successively launched their own mobile phone side large models in the form of cooperation or self-development, and emphasized that with the support of the large model, the AI capabilities of smart phones have been upgraded from intelligent voice assistants to personal intelligent assistants, which has also promoted the demand for replacement.

In the face of the phenomenon of large models accelerating to mobile terminals, Zhao Ming, CEO of Honor, recently introduced: "Answering questions with dialogue, writing an essay, and writing a science fiction novel has nothing to do with mobile AI. ”

He believes that the device-side large model is an upgrade of the evolution and development of platform-level AI. "The computing power and data volume of mobile AI cannot be compared with the network model. The greatest value of mobile AI is that it can protect user privacy, make data more secure, and make users' lives more convenient. Because it is trained one-on-one by the user alone, it is the most user-friendly and serves the user. Zhao Ming said.

However, from the perspective of practical application, in order to make the mobile phone have the ability to run large models, high requirements are put forward for chips, storage and power consumption, which means that the mobile phone itself needs a high hardware configuration, so the large model will be the first to land on high-end mobile phones. Secondly, for mobile phone manufacturers, the device-side large model is not simply compressed into the mobile phone, but deeply integrated with the underlying system.

As more and more mobile phone manufacturers begin to implement large models in terminal applications, a new round of technology competition will also start again.

The device-side model has become a new battlefield for mobile phone manufacturers

At present, the domestic head mobile phone manufacturers have been assembled in the AI large model track. Judging from the path chosen by major mobile phone manufacturers, most of them will land large models by accessing the operating system.

According to reports, at the beginning of August, at the Huawei Developer Conference, Yu Chengdong said that the Hongmeng 4.0 system will usher in a new voice assistant "Xiaoyi", which includes functions such as knowledge acquisition, logical reasoning, task planning, memory expansion, tool invocation and production assistance. Also in August, Lei Jun said in his annual speech that Xiaomi fully embraced large models, and in April this year, it had formed a Xiaomi AI large model team. On October 26, Xiaomi released the surging OS and officially announced that it would implant a large AI model into the system.

In November, vivo released its self-developed AI "Blue Heart" large model at the developer conference, including five self-developed large models with three different parameter levels, among which, the 7 billion parameter large language model on the device side has been implemented, and the 13 billion parameter blue heart large model has been run through the device side.

In a hurry to embed the large model directly into the mobile phone operating system, mobile phone manufacturers can be described as "you sing and I will appear". On December 26, Honor said that it would launch the new MagicOS 8.0 system and the self-developed terminal side 7B (7 billion parameter scale) large model "Magic Model" at the Honor Developer Conference in mid-January. On December 28, Honor announced MagicOS 8.0's new interactive feature based on platform-level AI - any door, that is, based on user intent, one-step direct access across applications.

Taking the taxi scenario as an example, the traditional interactive way of taking a taxi takes 10 seconds and multi-step operations, first selecting the address, copying the address content, switching the desktop to find the taxi APP, pasting the address to the address bar, etc., while the "Any Door" function allows users to enter the taxi software by simply holding down the address content and dragging it, which solves the problems of APP information islands and service entrances that are too deep. In addition, any door can also realize "one-to-one search", "one-to-one shopping" and so on. "Honor empowers all modules with AI as a platform-based capability. Lu Haisheng, head of Honor MagicOS, said at a recent media pre-communication conference.

Although large models such as ChatGPT and Wenxin Yiyan already have mobile apps, and these apps use cloud computing power to run, which will not cause additional burden on mobile phone configuration, major mobile phone manufacturers still spend a lot of time and money to develop their own end-side large models. This is because the large model in the form of APP cannot empower the capabilities of other APPs in the mobile phone, and the large model integrated into the mobile phone system can break the barriers between various applications.

In response to "what changes can be brought about after the arrival of the device-side large model", Lu Haisheng said: "YOYO (Honor Mobile Smart Assistant) will rise from the perception ability of the past to the ability to learn Xi. In the past, it was more about the regular learning Xi of user behavior, but now there is more content learning Xi, and even reasoning in some data. Second, change the entire way of human-computer interaction, from traditional imperative interaction to human intent-based interaction. The ability of the large model itself to interact naturally with dialogue and understand intent will be greatly improved. Traditional human-computer interaction is actually based on search and memory, and after the user has a clear intention, he starts to find and do it based on the user's intention, but the new interaction includes deterministic intention, possible intention and potential intention. And any door is a service that Honor brings to you to understand the user's intent between various applications. ”

Looking back on the development of human-computer interaction, the first is the command-line interactive interface represented by DOS, then there is the graphical interactive interface with keyboard and mouse input represented by Windows, and then to the touch-centered smartphone interaction represented by Android and iOS. Today, AI is redefining how smart devices interact.

Large-scale models on the landing side still face many challenges

It can be seen that after the implementation of the device-side large model, more and more consumers have begun to apply the large model, making it a helper in work and life, and solving the needs of users in multiple scenarios, which is also expected to bring new driving force to mobile phone consumption. According to the research report of Huafu Securities, the end-side large model will become an important direction for consumer electronics brand manufacturers to improve personalized user experience and create product differentiation competitiveness, and the launch of new terminal products with stronger AI capabilities may drive the bottoming out recovery of consumer electronics.

However, running large models has high requirements for chips, computing power, memory and other hardware, so at this stage, large models are still mainly focused on the high-end mobile phone market.

The device-side large model inevitably has requirements for computing power. "The device-side large model that can't do 7 billion parameters is very poor in practicability, and even unusable because the parameters are too low. Zhao Ming said at a seminar last month. He believes that the device-side large model must have low-power technology to achieve the normal operation of high computing power. "Honor has been accumulating (AI)-related technologies since independence, and Magic Live platform-level AI technology is the predecessor of the device-side large model, which we call the low-power AI engine. ”

Lu Haisheng also revealed: "Honor has invested tens of billions of yuan in R&D in the direction of AI, with a team of more than 1,000 people. ”

At present, a small number of chips, such as Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and MediaTek Dimensity 9300, can carry the end-to-end landing of large models.

In terms of memory, the vice president of vivo and the vice president of OS products have said that once the real large model is applied in a large area, there are many problems. "The large model of 1B (1 billion) parameters occupies 1GB of memory, 7B accounts for 4GB, and 13B exceeds 7GB, while the memory of high-end mobile phones is 12GB or 16GB, which is quite challenging. "Around thinks.

Zhao Ming believes that the current innovation and development of mobile phones has reached a new explosive period. "Android provides an ecology that provides interfaces and interactions between APPs, but Honor's value proposition on the operating system is the personalization of the operating system, which is also the direction of Honor's development in the future. ”

National Business Daily