Do you still remember the beauty of the word "smart" when the word "smart" was just added to mobile phones? The concept of app stores has become the focus, many users are always looking for interesting new apps in the list, developers are also dreaming that their works can soar overnight, and giants have built their own platforms.
Nowadays, it seems that none of the above three can longer find the enthusiasm of the past, and it is difficult to evoke freshness with homogeneous apps and games. However, on the list of app stores, a new type of app is quietly achieving a card position, and even has a place in the home screen of many mobile phone users. In the future, they are expected to be in a class of their own in the concept of app stores.
Apple wants to open an AI app store
If you look at the TOP20 of today's Apple App Store list, you can find that ChatGPT and Copilot occupy a position respectively, and ChatGPT has also been recommended by Apple to the list of must-have apps. They are all representatives of today's generative AI applications, among which Copilot has become a new search engine choice for many people due to its ability to enable ChatGPT 4.0 for free.
In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Ben Reitzes, head of Melius Research, said in an interview with CNBC on Monday that Apple may launch a new AI app store at WWDC in June, which is expected to include AI apps from major vendors.
Previously, multiple sources also showed that Apple will show you these new systems and software that incorporate AI elements at WWDC 2024, and Apple's iOS 18 upgrade will focus on the enhancement of AI capabilities, and Siri will also usher in a new upgrade.
Not long ago, Apple's R&D team also released a paper "MM1: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training", which unveiled the multimodal large model MM1 for the first time, demonstrating the company's progress and strength in AI. MM1 has a maximum parameter size of 30 billion, and the model supports enhanced context learning and multi-image inference, and performs well in some multimodal benchmarks. In comparison, the number of parameters of large models running locally on mobile phones is generally up to 7 billion.
How to support developers to use AI capabilities to create easy-to-use products is also promoting the emergence of AI app stores on another level.
Developer's "AI Store"
Many users who have deployed Stable Diffusion on their PCs will be familiar with the CIVITAI site, which is undoubtedly an "AI store" of generative image models, which users can download according to their preferred style and model type, including realism, comics, prints, news posters, impressionism, Renaissance, sketching, and many other different styles.
Recently, Qualcomm AI Hub, which has been praised by many as the "AI app store", although it is aimed at developers, it also includes simple CNNs and RNNs to large models, such as Whisper, ControlNet, Stable Diffusion and Baichuan-7B, and can be used in different execution environments (runtime) in combination with different practical application scenarios It can achieve excellent device-side AI performance, reduce memory footprint, and improve energy efficiency in different forms of terminals. All models are optimized to take full advantage of the hardware acceleration capabilities of all cores (NPU, CPU, and GPU) within the Qualcomm AI Engine, resulting in up to 4x faster inference.
At the same time, AI tool platforms for different audiences are also emerging on the Internet to present various applications in a centralized manner, such as browser plug-ins, software plug-ins, online sites, and special software.
This undoubtedly reflects the current explosion of AI applications.
AI applications are exploding
CIVITAI is actually a good example of how a single large model can derive personalized products for different needs.
For example, with the explosion of large language models early last year, their translation capabilities have been well recognized, but users who need to frequently copy text content to generative AI platforms are significantly less efficient. As a result, some developers use the method of calling API interfaces to design new translation tools to help users obtain translated content directly through word selection in the process of browsing the web.
In fact, on the iOS and Android platforms, in addition to the well-known applications introduced at the beginning of the article, some AI applications released by third-party developers have also received good responses.
"Draw Things" is undoubtedly a typical representative, only need to install this app, you can deploy the cumbersome local Stable Diffusion process for ordinary people with one click, users can also choose to download different models in the app, adjust parameters, and finally get their ideal image generation effect.
Some players are also experimenting with deploying large language models on their phones. In addition to a series of demonstrations such as those of international manufacturers at this year's exhibition, users have also successfully deployed the Llama2-7B model to Android or iPhone based on MLC LLM, and a series of tutorials and toolkits have been provided on the Internet. There is even an app like Draw Things, MLC Chat. There are about 3 apps of the same type in the Apple App Store, among which LLM Farm can also allow users to choose models with different parameter levels to have conversations separately. There are even paid apps that have been derived, and the promotional slogan is similar to the local AI on mobile phones: "Offline chat, privacy first"
There are also many small but beautiful products like translation plug-ins, such as Scribbler, which is an interesting application to "draw a cat and a tiger".
Even if Apple has now built an "AI app store", it already has a good lineup. Coupled with the follow-up promotion of Apple's own large model, it may usher in a new explosion of magnitude.
What's more, perhaps AI will arouse consumers' new enthusiasm for mobile phones, and app stores will also evoke the once-"nuggets" enthusiasm, once again bringing people that sense of surprise "from scratch".