Smartphones will never be the same again: how artificial intelligence will change the gadgets we’re used to and why

GenAI smartphones will have orders of magnitude more powerful chips, the ability to solve complex AI tasks without sending requests to the “cloud”, and their own AI chatbots.

Generative AI (general artificial intelligence) is gradually entering the consumer hardware market. In the second half of this year, manufacturers will probably offer consumers the so-called “GenAI smartphones”. Fast Company tells us what these devices are and what users should know about them.

What is “GenAI Smartphone”

The term “smartphone GenAI” (smartphone generating artificial intelligence) has only become known in the last six months, after appearing in the reports of several large marketing research companies.

In December 2023, Counterpoint Technology Market Research released a report on GenAI smartphones, which described one of their key features as “a subset of AI smartphones that use generative AI to create original content, rather than simply providing pre-programmed responses or perform predetermined tasks.” In February, Gartner proposed its own definition, which states that one of the key differences between the GenAI phone and conventional smartphones is the ability to locally run a basic or refined AI model that generates new derived versions of content, strategy, design and method.

Counterpoint and Gartner’s definitions differ slightly, but it’s safe to say that a GenAI smartphone can be considered a gadget that has at least four of the following features:

• the presence of generative applications and tools such as AI chatbots, AI image editing and image creation applications.
• full integration of these AI applications with the operating system with the ability to use them seamlessly throughout the system.
• the presence of central processors designed specifically to solve complex artificial intelligence tasks.
• the presence of enough power to run AI models on the device rather than sending data to the cloud for remote processing by servers.

Samsung Galaxy S24 AI capabilities test

Which phones do not fall under the “GenAI” category.

If we consider the 4 criteria of smartphones with generative AI, then as of May 2024, only some devices can be considered true GenAI phones. This is because most gadgets available do not have chips specifically designed to solve complex AI tasks.

And while many modern smartphones support apps like ChatGPT, that doesn’t mean they’re GenAI phones because user requests aren’t processed locally on the device itself. Instead, everything they enter into the ChatGPT application is sent to OpenAI servers for remote processing. The situation is similar in the case of creating images by generative artificial intelligence – all tasks are performed by remote servers.

Based on 4 criteria, only the latest Google and Samsung flagships can remotely qualify as GenAI phones. The Samsung Galaxy S24 and Google Pixel 8 Pro use Gemini Nano, a “stripped-down” version of Google’s large speech model that can run on the smartphone itself, provided the processor is powerful enough.

The future of GenAI phones

When it comes to GenAI phones and marketing, expect an aggressive push towards AI gadgets. Smartphone sales have remained steady for years because evolutionary leaps occur over long intervals. Probably every smartphone company in the world sees the boom in generative AI as a savior that will help them revive sales.

But will consumers line up for such smartphones? Counterpoint research says that – Yes. The marketing firm says that while GenAI models are expected to account for just 11% of all smartphones in 2024, by 2027 they will account for 43% of all shipments, and in the same year the number of GenAI phones in use worldwide will exceed 1 billion devices.