Qualcomm chipsets power many Android smartphones and tablets, as well as some Windows PCs and embedded devices. Today the company revealed some advancements that could mean your next Android phone will have its own local ChatGPT-like chatbot or Stable Diffusion-like image generator, without needing external servers or paid subscriptions.
Qualcomm had a lot of AI-related announcements today, including a “Qualcomm AI Hub” that gives app developers access to optimized AI model, as well as new modems with “AI-powered 5G.” The company also discussed running large multimodal models (LLMs) on an Android phone with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, potentially allowing more AI tasks to run locally on a smartphone, instead of using an external service like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, or Galaxy AI. There are privacy and usability advantages to this approach: you don’t need an external server to process responses (which might cost money), and all the data stays on your device.
In a press release, Qualcomm says it has the world’s first LMM running on an Android smartphone, but didn’t mention the exact hardware being used (presumably a phone with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip). The company described the demo as “a 7+ billion parameter LMM that can accept multiple types of data inputs, including text and images, and generate multi-turn conversations with an AI assistant about an image — running on an Android smartphone for the first time.” It’s a modified version of the LLaVA model.
Qualcomm also showed off a modified build of Stable Diffusion, the popular AI image generator, running on an Android phone. Stable Diffusion is running in “Low Rank Adaption” mode (LoRA), which reduces the size of the training data while still offering decent quality and performance. This setup won’t work as well as Stable Diffusion on a full desktop graphics card or remote GPU server, but it’s still impressive. Qualcomm tested another demo of Stable Diffusion on an Android phone back in 2023, which was capable of generating a 512×512 image in under 15 seconds.
These demos exist more as technical benchmarks for Qualcomm’s hardware than anything else, and it’s unclear if this will become a polished app you can run on Android phones and tablets. It’s possible Qualcomm might share its work on its new “AI Hub,” where other developers could use it in their own phone and tablet apps. With some more work, we could have a limited ChatGPT-like assistant on android phones without a cloud requirement—something that Apple is rumored to be working on for iPhones.
Source: Qualcomm
