No matter where in commercial technology you turn, you’ll probably find mentions of large language models andgenerative AItools splattered all over the place. FromChatGPTtoGoogle Bard, every big tech company wants to get a piece of the generative AI pie.
Samsung goes all in on AI with its Galaxy S24 lineup
Samsung’s latest Ultra gave us a few surprises after all, including Galaxy AI and titanium housing.
Samsung has started on a potentially radical entrée of its own, the consequences of which will affect millions of Galaxy device buyers worldwide soon enough. We explain what Galaxy AI is, where you’ll find it on theGalaxy S24 lineup, what it might become, and what the way forward might be.
What is Galaxy AI and where does it come from?
Samsung firstteasedGalaxy AI in November 2023 as a user-facing set of on-device and cloud-based services that will improve how you use your phone or tablet. It officially came into life with the launch of theGalaxy S24 seriesof Android phones the following January. In short, Galaxy AI leverages your phone’s processing power instead of massive central servers to deliver some of the same features as the web-based generative AI services you’ve come to know, but without the need to be connected to the internet.
Mobile technology has an incredible power to enable connection, productivity, creativity, and more for people around the world, but until now, we haven’t seen mobile AI ignite that in truly meaningful ways…Galaxy AI is our most comprehensive intelligence offering to date, and it will change how we think about our phones forever.
– Wonjoon Choi, EVP and Head of R&D, Mobile eXperience Business.
The company’s initiative actually follows upon Google’s own dip of its toes witha couple of on-device AI features it worked into its Pixel 8 Pro. Android is effectively being reworked to allow every device on Android 14 and above to tap into a tiny version of its own model (Gemini Nano) when an app calls for it.
In the case of Galaxy AI, however, the Korean tech giant is using its own large language model and is being more ambitious about where it plugs into – at least in the beginning. The goal here is to harness whatever power is on-site and reduce the user-side cost of requesting AI transactions by running applications locally.
The company has developed three sub-models or tools with Gauss:
What features can you use with Samsung Galaxy AI?
With the Galaxy S24 series, no matter whether it runs on Samsung’s Exynos 2400 or Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chipset, you’ll be able to try out the following features from right within certain application experiences on your device – some of which can run without an internet connection. Here are the features you’ll be seeing:
Of course, as generative AI features have the potential to gin up controversy, there are some caveats to be had:
What’s the big deal with Samsung Galaxy AI?
There has seemingly always been a back and forth fight between major tech competitors over one trend or another. This time around, it looks like everyone’s going all out on generative AI features.Appleseems to be the other elephant in the room that is slow-rolling its own AI hype. Execution matters in determining the success or failure of a particular approach. We can recall the digital assistant craze last decade when Samsung decided to put upBixbyagainst the likes of Google Assistant, Siri, and even Amazon’s Alexa.
While there’s been some continued use in the company’s insular home market of South Korea, it has been a non-factor elsewhere. Bixby’s knowledge and intuition weren’t that great in Western markets to begin with. The fact thatSamsung dedicated a hardware button on the Galaxy S8 and S9 to calling Bixby(which initially could not be reprogrammed to do something else) also did not ingratiate the assistant to users.
Samsung and its competitors seem keen on diversifying the surfaces where they apply AI features to avoid bundling everything into a central client that can either be easily ignored or pervasively present. That might benefit their generative AI pushes in the long run while keeping the focus on the core services they’re enhancing.
