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Will 2024 be a turning point for smartphones? The question could be generated by artificial intelligence, if we fed the data to a large language model.
This is because the global market returned to show a sign of growth in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to Gartner, after 9 consecutive quarters of decline. Perhaps the worst is behind us but artificial intelligence has nothing to do with it, at least for the moment, even if it is even obvious to say that it will be the main trend of this Mobile World Congress.
«There is already a lot of AI in smartphones today, the novelty is the arrival of generative AI especially in a light format, tailor-made for smartphones» Roberta Cozza, Gartner analyst, explains to us on the phone from London. «By “light” we mean a version capable of running on the device, without querying the cloud. An example is Gemini Nano already present on the Pixel 8. We expect to see other solutions of this nature.”
Artificial intelligence on the device has the advantage of reducing costs, because cloud queries also have a greater guarantee of privacy and lower latency.
This doesn’t mean cloud AI won’t play a role. But the forms this technology will take are still liquid. There is still a lot to prove regarding value for users: for now the only one to move forward has been Samsung with the s24. The protagonists range from Google to Microsoft, from the super capitalized Nvidia (worth around 2 trillion dollars on Wall Street), to Qualcomm, to the Chinese Baidu, to the manufacturers, to what Apple decides to do.