Domestic mobile phones are "all staffed" to access DeepSeek, except for it

The era of everyone having an agent is coming

Author/ IT Times reporter Sun Yan

Editor/ Hao Junhui

DeepSeek “飓风 ”来袭。

It has swept the AI circle, with more than 30 cloud service vendors at home and abroad and nearly 20 domestic chip companies accessing and adapting; It has swept the mobile phone circle, and domestic mobile phone manufacturers are scrambling to access DeepSeek, and only Xiaomi has not officially announced a follow-up.

On February 13, Chairman Joe Tsai of Alibaba Group confirmed that Apple and Alibaba will work together to develop AI features for iPhone users in China. Previously, it was reported that Apple had also approached DeepSeek, but the DeepSeek team lacked the manpower and experience needed to support a large customer like Apple.

Where else will this "hurricane" "roll"? Not only AI mobile phones, but also AI PCs want to use DeepSeek to "stir up". But what excites ordinary people even more is that DeepSeek has lowered the technical threshold for AI innovation, reduced the cost of enterprises involved in the AI wave, and a new era of popularization of AI hardware and AI agent (agent) innovation is coming.

Apple falls Ali and Samsung joins hands with Zhipu

Among all the mobile phone manufacturers that have connected to DeepSeek, Huawei has moved the fastest, and has officially announced the access on February 5. However, the "IT Times" reporter found that at present, only Huawei mobile phone devices that use the pure-blooded HarmonyOS system and the Xiaoyi App version is upgraded to 11.2.10.340 and above can wake up DeepSeek by talking directly with the Xiaoyi voice assistant.

On February 8, Honor officially announced the access, similar to Huawei, it can also wake up DeepSeek-R1 through the YOYO agent.

ZTE's Nubia, which embeds DeepSeek into the system in internal testing. Ni Fei, President of Nubia Technology Co., Ltd., said on February 10 that instead of simply and quickly using the "agent solution" to access, we chose to embed DeepSeek into the system more deeply, and it is a full-size embedding with 671 billion parameters! It takes a lot of R&D effort, but who doesn't want a full-blooded DeepSeek?

In addition to Xiaomi, almost all domestic mobile phone manufacturers have been connected to DeepSeek. Due to the compliance requirements, the "serial drama" of the implementation of AI functions in foreign mobile phones is still being staged.

On the evening of February 11th, the news of Samsung's cooperation with Zhipu AI Agent was confirmed by Zhipu, and the cooperation between the two sides began in October 2024 to promote the direct embedding of the Zhipu large model into the Samsung mobile phone system layer, and when Samsung launched the previous generation S24 series, it deeply integrated a number of capabilities of Baidu's Wenxin large model. On February 12, the news of Apple's drop on Ali spread far and wide until it was confirmed the next day.

Before the advent of DeepSeek, domestic mobile phone manufacturers mostly chose to develop their own large models, including Huawei's Pangu, Xiaomi's MiLM, and vivo's Blue Heart.

"It is impossible for mainstream mobile phone manufacturers to hand over their lives to others, and self-developed end-side large models are their only way out, and they have enough funds and technical strength." An AI manufacturer who has been in contact with many mobile phone manufacturers believes that the vast majority of models have not been able to solve the problem of adapting to AI in existing mobile phones, but the model needs to be adapted to chips and systems, the hardware needs to open a new production line, and the software needs to be developed.

Until this question is thought through, no mobile phone manufacturer dares to take the leap into AI.

From 2024, mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple, Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo will all launch their own AI technologies, trying to turn them into a driving force for users to change their phones.

However, AI hasn't boosted phone sales in a big way.

Global mobile phone sales in 2024 will be 1.22 billion units, a year-on-year increase of only 7%. What's more regrettable is that the two major brands of Apple and Samsung have become the only mobile phone brands in the top 10, and none of the domestic mobile phone brands can stand out in this list.

The reason for this is that AI does not bring a disruptive experience on mobile phones, and the main functions currently implemented are only AI retouching, document summarization, real-time translation, personal assistant, etc. One of the most controversial and discussed features is Honor's AI-powered automatic coffee ordering, as long as you say "order a drink, I'm a little sleepy" to the YOYO agent that comes with the HONOR phone, the agent will immediately open the food delivery app, click on a coffee shop, select a certain coffee drink, add it to the shopping cart and wait for the settlement confirmation. The whole process does not require the user's hands, just move the mouth.

After connecting to DeepSeek, whether the functional experience of AI mobile phones will be subverted, the industry generally reflects that it is still experiencing and verifying, and it needs to be polished for a period of time.

"Pinduoduo in the AI world"

Promote the democratization of AI hardware

In addition to AI phones, AI PCs are also on fire with DeepSeek.

Recently, Lenovo announced that the personal agent "Xiaotian" is connected to DeepSeek, and users who use Lenovo AI PCs can wake up DeepSeek through Lenovo Xiaotian.

Lenovo occupies the first-mover advantage of AI PCs and has always been at the forefront of the market. As of the third quarter of 2024, Lenovo Group has a 20% share of the AI PC market, with 13.3 million units shipped, accounting for 20% of total PC shipments in the quarter. And for Lenovo, AI PCs have a significant pull on its market share in high-end notebooks, with the market share of high-end products above $800 increasing by 4.6 percentage points year-on-year in the first half of 2024.

In addition, Lenovo is exploring more possibilities for in-depth cooperation with DeepSeek. DeepSeek's open source has greatly lowered the threshold for enterprises to enter the AI wave, and government and enterprise applications are expected to see fission-like growth by 2025. Many enterprises want to transform from traditional IT services to AI agent applications through DeepSeek's localized deployment. After discovering this trend, Lenovo immediately developed an all-in-one computer based on DeepSeek.

"Generally, only the DeepSeek quantization model can be deployed on the PC, and the effect will not be too good, and the full-blood version still needs an intelligent computing server, such as two H800s." Chen Ran, founder of the open source community of large model developers, told the IT Times.

Since its emergence in the circle, DeepSeek has been known as the "Pinduoduo of AI", and has amazed the world by reducing the cost of large models. With very little annotated data, DeepSeek-R1 achieves performance comparable to OpenAI o1 in mathematics, code, natural language reasoning, etc., and the price is only about 3% of o1, which is the most cost-effective and completely open source.

At present, mobile phone manufacturers only carry AI functions on flagship mobile phones, and the price of AI PCs generally exceeds 10,000 yuan. Only by looking for the most cost-effective AI large model can manufacturers bring the price down and ultimately promote the popularization of AI hardware.

On the short video platform, bloggers plug in microphones and speakers on the palm-sized development board to directly voice dialogue AI, check the weather, control smart homes, etc. China's industrial chain, which has always had a keen sense of smell, quickly reported that on platforms such as Taobao, the cost of saving a DeepSeek hardware such as an AI speaker is as low as 100 yuan.

According to media reports, there have been more than 400 DeepSeek AI hardware projects on developer forums at home and abroad, such as the vegetable market AI pricing scale can prevent shortages, and the AI speaker with automatic arrangement function has become a productivity tool for square dance aunts.

Mobile phones and PCs equipped with AI clippers are breaking Moore's Law. "Looking back over the past few hundred years, the essence of innovation is about cost reduction and productivity improvement." On February 11, Baidu founder Robin Li said at the WGS in Dubai when talking about DeepSeek with the UAE AI minister that today, the pace of innovation is much faster than ever, according to Moore's Law, every 18 months, the performance of classical computing doubles and the cost is halved, but the cost of large model inference is reduced by more than 90% per year.

If DeepSeek's innovation began with the decline in the cost of large models, DeepSeek's open source accelerated the popularization of AI hardware and lowered the threshold for AI innovation for all.

A new era is coming at the speed of light

DeepSeek changes

The development path of AI agent

Although the hallucination rate of DeepSeek-R1 is questioned as high as 14.3%, which is not only nearly 4 times that of DeepSeek-V3, but also far exceeds the industry average, and its experience applied to hardware such as AI mobile phones still needs to be optimized, it is undeniable that DeepSeek has the strength to break the "impossible triangle" of device-side AI and popularize large models to more AI devices.

Yu Qingyang, a senior consultant at the Shanghai Institute of Artificial Intelligence, mentioned that there are many challenges in the current application of AI on the device side: the cost-effectiveness is not clear, the application cost per unit of computing power is high, and there is a gap between the user's expectation of actual value and the actual investment; The computing power resources on the device side are limited, and the computing power and storage capacity on the device side are difficult to meet the fine-tuning and inference requirements of large models. The performance of the model is poor, and the prediction accuracy of the model may be low due to the compression and lightweight processing of the model.

Can the "impossible triangle" formed by cost, computing power, and performance be broken by DeepSeek? In Yu Qingyang's view, DeepSeek promotes the exponential reduction of model training and inference costs through algorithm and engineering optimization, thereby reducing the requirements of large models for end-side computing power, and end-side AI can be more widely deployed, such as AI surveillance cameras, smart drones, smart homes, smart glasses and other smart devices, which is expected to further accelerate the popularization and development of end-side AI.

"DeepSeek has changed the path of AI Agent." Chen Yunwen, CEO of Daguan Data, said.

There is an experiment that proves that when a piece of glass is inserted in the middle of the fish tank, when more and more fish hit the glass, even if the glass is removed, no fish will dare to cross the invisible line. He Enpei, the founder of Communicative Language, commented that DeepSeek is the fish that breaks the glass, and he very much agrees with Liang Wenfeng's point of view, the gap between Chinese and American AI lies in the gap between innovation and follow.

At this point, I think of a sentence written by Liang Wenfeng in the circle of friends last year: "The old world is falling apart, and the new era is coming at the speed of light." "The era of everyone having an agent is accelerating.

Typesetting / Ji Jiaying

Image/ Weibo, Huawei, Lenovo, Touhou IC

Source/"IT Times" official account vittimes

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