According to the chief executive of chip manufacturer Qualcomm, the exploding popularity of ChatGPT presents an opportunity to demonstrate the capabilities of artificial intelligence on smartphones.
At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Cristiano Amon stated, “This is the milestone we’ve been waiting for to establish Qualcomm as an AI company.”
ChatGPT, a chatbot created by research company OpenAI, has been widely shared online as users ask it to generate text, answer questions, or provide detailed, responsive information.
Qualcomm demonstrated at the conference as well as videos of text being used to generate AI images on an Android phone.
Amon stated, “You want to generate any image that you want to share with somebody, you want to do it in real-time — think about what Microsoft is doing with search, and you want to chat with the search results. For you to make that happen, you can’t run everything in a data center, you’re going to have to bring the AI to the devices.”
He stated that large-language models will be generated entirely within smartphones, implying that they will function without internet access.
“The ability to create that much processing power in a smartphone and run that without compromising the battery life is something that only Qualcomm can do,” he claimed.
Bernstein analysts stated in a note this week that chipmakers could benefit from a multi-billion dollar annual market opportunity for the powering of AI queries.
In collaboration with Meta, Samsung, and Google, Qualcomm has also provided chips for a variety of virtual reality devices.
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According to Amon, the “merging of physical and digital spaces” and the next frontier of computing are smart glasses.
“I can see a scenario that you’re going to have your companion glasses to your phone, and eventually you’re just going to have the glasses. And the potential is incredible.”
He added, “It’s going to happen, it’s coming very soon.”
Amon also said that Qualcomm didn’t think it would make modems for the new iPhone in 2024, which suggests that the tech giant might be getting closer to making its own products.
