Trend丨There is a new rolling method for mobile phones, and manufacturers are vying to put large models into mobile phones

Judging from the performance of the market, in fact, both the Chinese smartphone market and the global smartphone market have fallen into a recession in terms of overall market capacity.

Data shows: In the first quarter of 2023, the global smartphone market shipped 280.2 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 14% and a month-on-month decrease of 7%.

In the domestic market, data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that the domestic smartphone market will still be sluggish at the beginning of 2023. In the first quarter, the domestic smartphone market shipped approximately 65.44 million units, a year-on-year decrease of 11.8%, continuing the decline in shipments every quarter since 2022. The volume of goods dropped by more than 10% year-on-year.

As the market shrinks, when it comes to product competition among manufacturers, we can also find that manufacturers have almost nothing to offer in smartphone products due to the dilemma of innovation.

Whether it is the appearance design, materials used, image configuration, or hardware configuration, they are almost highly consistent. This has also made it increasingly difficult for smartphone manufacturers to have something eye-catching in their current press conferences.

And in May this year, OpenAI released the iOS version of the ChatGPT application. In less than three weeks, the market has been downloaded up to 5 million times. Before and after that, apps related to large AI models had flooded the iOS and Android app stores.

While Internet manufacturers are still discussing when the "Chinese version of ChatGPT" will be born, mobile phone manufacturers and industry chain players are also looking for new opportunities brought by large models to the mobile phone industry, trying to get a share of the pie.

Predicting the future with big models everywhere

In April 2023, Chinese AI evangelist Lu Qi said in a speech that the future is an era where models are everywhere, and he firmly predicted that one day large models will run on mobile phones.

At this year's MWC, Qualcomm conducted the world's first device-side Stable Diffusion demonstration of running more than 1 billion parameter models and generating images based on text input on a mobile phone equipped with the second-generation Snapdragon 8 mobile platform. The performance and accuracy level reached Similar level to the cloud.

Last month, Qualcomm demonstrated a ControlNet image generation image model that supports 1.5 billion parameters on the terminal side without accessing any cloud.

By the end of this year and next year, Qualcomm is expected to enable models that support parameters of 10 billion and 20 billion to run on the terminal side.

The prediction that large models will run on mobile phones has become a reality in advance by Qualcomm.

Huawei officially announced on August 29 that the Huawei Mate 60 pro mobile phone has been put on the shelves. According to reports, Huawei has made another breakthrough in the field of satellite communications. Mate 60 Pro has become the world's first mass smartphone to support satellite calls. It can make and receive satellite calls calmly even when there is no terrestrial network signal.

At the same time, Mate 60 Pro will be connected to the Pangu artificial intelligence large model to provide consumers with a smarter interactive experience.

Huawei Managing Director and Huawei Cloud CEO Zhang Ping'an once again clarified Huawei's positioning in the large model field at the Huawei Developer Conference 2023 and will not make "ChatGPT" products.

He said that Pangu Large Model 3.0 is a large model system that provides services completely to the industry and is designed based on industry needs.

In Baidu's financial report released on May 16, Robin Li mentioned most of Wen Xin Yiyan and said that Wen Xin Yiyan was gradually integrated into all Baidu's businesses.

On May 22, Baidu's Xiaodu brand launched its first smartphone - Xiaodu Qinghe Learning Phone, which is targeted at young student users and has a built-in customization system and a large AI learning model.

Xiaodu Qinghe Learning Mobile is a customized system specifically for teenagers. It is the first to create three major usage modes: "intelligent learning", "listening" and "application", which respectively cover the needs of AI teaching, bilingual resources for listening and learning, and daily mobile phone applications.

Based on Xiaodu Lingji's large model, the "AI teacher" on Xiaodu Qinghe Learning mobile phone can provide conversational explanations and support full-link tutoring such as AI photo lectures, Chinese and English AI composition tutoring, and AI oral practice.

As a necessary terminal for AI life, mobile phones have become a gap in Xiaodu's whole-house intelligence. This time it enters the mobile phone track from the education field, which can be said to be an attempt with low trial and error costs.

At present, Xiaomi's large model MiLM-6B has been unexpectedly exposed. It has achieved tenth place and first place in Chinese on the two large model test platforms of C-Eval and CMMLU respectively.

According to the information given on the GitHub project page, the Xiaomi large model is a large-scale pre-trained language model developed by Xiaomi, with a parameter size of 6.4 billion.

Not only Xiaomi, but also many domestic mobile phone manufacturers are considering AI large models as a new means of differentiated competition.

Recently, Huawei announced the access to Pangu large model capabilities in the updated HarmonyOS 4.0. The voice assistant Xiaoyi has become the first smart assistant with AI large model capabilities and is scheduled to be open for testing in late August.

OPPO, vivo, Honor, etc. are also planning to release mobile phones equipped with large model capabilities within the year.

Only Apple remains on the sidelines. Although Apple CEO Cook also uses iPhone and other hardware as a carrier for the company to showcase AI technology and recognizes the huge wave of changes caused by artificial intelligence, Apple appears to be quite cautious in the development of large models.

There are currently three mainstream solutions in the industry: one is an app similar to cloud services or ChatGPT, which provides large-scale model calculations in the cloud and then feeds them back to the mobile phone. The advantage of this solution is that it does not need to rely on the weak computing power of the mobile phone. The disadvantage is that it requires an Internet connection, and Information security is an issue;

The second is local deployment, local computing, and local services. Large models can be run directly on the mobile phone’s own processor, which is what Zhao Ming calls “device-side.” Its advantage is that it is not restricted by the network and the information is stored locally, but whether the computing power of mobile phones can support the operation of large models is a problem;

The third option is to combine the above two, with the cloud and terminal running together. The advantages and disadvantages are also the advantages and disadvantages of the above two.

In May of this year, half a year after the release of ChatGPT 3.5, Google finally announced a new generation of large language model PaLM2 to combat ChatGPT. As a differentiator, PaLM2 can be deployed on smartphones.

At that time, PaLM2 included four large models, named from large to small in parameter size: Unicorn, Bison, Otter and Gecko.

Only the "Gekko" with the smallest parameters can run on a mobile phone, and Google says it runs fast enough to work normally without an Internet connection.

Compared with those large models that appear in the form of APPs on mobile phones, a large model integrated into the mobile phone system can break down the barriers between applications and allow other apps to have their own large model features.

Through large models that are deeply integrated with mobile phone systems, people can not only empower various APPs with AI, but can even use large models as universal interfaces, like "glue", to combine the capabilities of various APPs to achieve better results. What an imaginative expansion.

The "volume" of mobile phone manufacturers actually reflects their anxiety from the side. In order to gain a foothold in the existing market, a war is inevitable.

But in any case, innovation in the mobile phone industry has been dormant for a long time. If large models can bring new markets and vitality, everyone will obviously be happy to see it happen. Even if it fails, it will be nothing more than another "misjudgment" by the giants.

Compared with users' expectations for improved mobile phone experience, the greater possibility of large models being put on cars may be to serve as a marketing selling point for manufacturers.

Content reference comes from: PConline Pacific Technology: Mobile phone + AI large model, what else is there besides gimmicks? ; Neighboring chapter: Can large models be a good way to save the smartphone market? ; Si Rui Insight: The "new species" Xiaodu Qinghe mobile phone takes off on a large model?

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