AI On Your Phone
A solution to a problem nobody actually has?
There’s a lot of hype currently surrounding the notion of AI assistants on people’s phones. Samsung got out of the gate early and Apple has just announced its underwhelming response with the imaginatively-named iPhone 16. The concept is simple: a clever AI assistant that magically gives you what you want, when you want it. Supposedly all the world’s phone zombies will find such services irresistible and continue to spend most of their waking moments gawping at their shiny screens.
But when we step back from the 20,000,000 foot view, it becomes difficult to see any real value in throwing AI at a phone and hoping something of utility will emerge.
First of all, there’s the cost. Sure, NPUs are cheaper than GPUs and fierce competition may make it far less likely that a single supplier predominates, as is the case with Nvidia and GPUs today. And sure, developers will learn how to compress certain elements of the AI model to make it more amenable to edge computing. But even with all these things assumed (which may be unwise), the power drain will still be immense. In return, users will get…. what, exactly?
It’s not really Earth-moving to point one’s phone at the outside of a restaurant and see a menu appear. It’s not particularly interesting, nor particularly wise, to…
