The new outlet of AI mobile phones, the traffic password of mobile phone manufacturers?

In 2011, Apple introduced Siri, a voice assistant based on AI and machine learning technology, on the iPhone 4S, and the mobile phone officially started the evolution process to artificial intelligence.

Since then, AI technology has become more and more widely used in mobile phones, including face recognition, mobile phone photography and images, and intelligent performance optimization. Nowadays, with the addition of end-side AI large model technology, "AI mobile phone" has become a completely different concept, and AI technology has made great progress in speech recognition, image recognition, intelligent recommendation, etc., bringing users a new user experience.

In the mobile phone industry, AI is believed to change the landscape of the entire smartphone industry. Liu Zuohu, Chief Product Officer of OPPO, pointed out, "In the era of AI mobile phones, the mobile phone industry and user experience will usher in revolutionary changes. Zhou Hongyi judged that 2024 is the first year of AI mobile phones, and large models will promote the arrival of the smartphone 2.0 era, and mobile phone manufacturers that do not turn to AI will become the next "Nokia".

AI mobile phones are not only the future development trend, but also a strategic track for mobile phone manufacturers to compete for. Since last year, major mobile phone manufacturers have accelerated the layout of the AI mobile phone market, intending to stand on a new outlet through "AI" and open up growth space for the sluggish mobile phone market. At present, Honor, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi, Meizu, etc. have all launched their own AI mobile phones.

So, who will sit down at the "new table" of AI mobile phones first, and how will they play their cards?

From usable to easy-to-use, AI mobile phones are moving towards underlying technological innovation

At present, the common practice of mobile phone manufacturers is to miniaturize the existing large model, and then introduce it into the mobile phone, and the functions that can be realized are mainly focused on the application level of image processing and retrieval, copywriting, semantic recognition, etc., and the mobile phone manufacturer is more like a "porter" role, and the AI large model application of the existing Internet platform is loaded into the mobile phone.

For example, Xiaomi's surging OS system can provide AI intelligent image expansion, magic elimination and other functions, and cooperate with WPS AI to achieve free PPT generation and other functions.

The logic of Honor is different, it divides the AI of the smart terminal into four layers, that is, the first layer uses AI to enable cross-system integration, so that different operating systems can make decisions through AI, and realize seamless connection and data sharing between mobile phones, tablets, PCs and other devices; The fourth layer is the device-cloud collaboration of AI, which presents the application of the network AI large model.

In the view of Zhao Ming, CEO of Honor, the application of AI on the device side is easier to achieve, because there are a large number of developers and third parties that can provide it, but what Honor needs to do is system-level AI capabilities. For example, based on the platform-level AI core, Honor MagicOS 8.0 creates human-computer interaction based on intent recognition. Its signature function is any door, and based on intent recognition, it can make the service achieve one-step direct access across applications and devices.

Recently, OPPO announced its AI strategy - "1+N Intelligent Twin Ecological Strategy". Specifically, OPPO's AI mobile phone ecosystem is composed of OPPO AI super agent and AI Pro agent development platform. On the AI Pro platform, developers can use the plug-ins provided by OPPO to build AI applications with simple operations.

Liu Zuohu, chief product officer of OPPO, emphasized that although OPPO has its own large-scale AI models, the company does not rule out working with other large-scale AI models. OPPO's goal is to choose the most suitable large model for a specific scenario to provide the best user experience. Under this strategy, cooperation is seen as more important than competition as it helps to bring better products and services to users.

vivo will focus on building a "1+2+N" intelligent system experience. Among them, "1" refers to vivo's self-developed blue-hearted large model BlueLM, "2" represents the system's global intelligent assistance application "Blueheart V" and the natural language conversational robot "Blueheart Qianxun" launched in the form of a public APP, and "N" represents the efficient and low-cost exclusive large-scale model created by developers with the help of vivo's industry's first open-source 7 billion blue-heart large model and the corresponding fine-tuning framework and development kit BlueKit.

Among them, the blue heart model is undoubtedly the top priority of vivo's layout of AI mobile phones. The vice president of vivo and the vice president of OS products believe that excellent self-developed large models need to have five characteristics: "large and complete, strong algorithms, true security, self-evolution, and wide open source", which are manifested in large data scale and model parameters, rich model matrix and comprehensive modal support, effective algorithm innovation, high security, continuous update of training data, and open source.

Price drop AI mobile phones accelerate the popularization process

At present, most of the AI mobile phones launched by mobile phone manufacturers are concentrated in high-end or flagship levels, and the prices are relatively high, which restricts the popularity of AI mobile phones. In the eyes of industry insiders, AI mobile phones need to run large models on the mobile phone, which puts forward higher requirements for the hardware specifications of the mobile phone itself, so AI mobile phones are mostly high-end models.

The vice president of vivo and the vice president of OS products once said frankly, "The large model of 1B (1 billion) parameters accounts for 1GB of memory, 7B (7 billion) accounts for 4GB, 13B exceeds 7GB, and the memory of high-end mobile phones is 12GB and 16GB." At present, mobile phone manufacturers, including OPPO, vivo and Honor, have officially announced that the AI model with 7 billion parameters has landed on the mobile phone, which is testing the storage capacity of the mobile phone.

In addition, AI mobile phones also put forward higher demands for the computing power of mobile phone chips. Guo Tianxiang, a senior analyst at IDC China, once said that in order to use the device-side large language model and Wensheng graph model faster and more efficiently, the NPU computing power of the mobile phone chip using the INT-8 data type must be at least 30TOPS, and the mobile phone chips that currently meet this standard mainly include Qualcomm 8 Gen3, Apple A17 pro, MediaTek Dimensity 9300, etc.

Recently, OnePlus launched the OnePlus Ace 3V, priced from 1999 yuan, which undoubtedly accelerated the popularity of AI mobile phones. According to Li Jie, OnePlus Ace 3V has released four AI functions for young people, including improving the efficiency of study, work and life by simulating real foreign teachers to practice speaking, simulating job interviews, sorting out paper frameworks, and generating copywriting on various platforms.

Zhou Hongyi said that for AI mobile phones to be truly popularized, it is necessary to start from the thousand-yuan file to truly eliminate the hegemony of AI in high-end machines and achieve "equal rights in science and technology".

It can be seen that with the further decline in prices, it will open up growth space for AI mobile phones. IDC predicts that global shipments of next-generation AI mobile phones will reach 170 million units in 2024, accounting for 15% of overall smartphone shipments. The share of AI mobile phones in the Chinese market will also grow rapidly, accounting for more than 50% by 2027.