Qualcomm has gone all in on artificial intelligence (AI) at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, US. The American semiconductor entity previewed a large multimodal AI model on Android phone and Windows PC, both powered by its Snapdragon platforms. It also displayed generative AI features on Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 powered devices from partners such as Xiaomi, OPPO, and HONOR. Below are the details:
AI on Android phone
Qualcomm previewed Large Language and Vision Assistant (LLaVA), a 7+ billion parameter large multimodal model (LMM) that can accept multiple types of data inputs, on an Android smartphone. Qualcomm said the model works with both text and images and the LMM runs on-device for enhanced privacy, reliability, personalisation, and cost.
Besides LLaVa, Qualcomm demonstrated Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA) running Stable Diffusion on an Android smartphone. According to Qualcomm, LoRA would allow users to create high-quality custom images based on personal or artistic preferences. Since LoRA is a scaled down version with reduced number of trainable parameters of AI models, it is said to enable efficiency, scalability, and customisation of on-device generative AI use cases.
Qualcomm said LoRA is broadly applicable for customised AI models, such as large language models, to create tailored personal assistants, improved language translation, and more.
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AI on Windows PC
Qualcomm previewed a Windows PC powered by Snapdragon X Elite platform to demonstrate on-device 7+ billion parameter LMM that can accept text and audio inputs to generate multi-turn conversations. Qualcomm said the Snapdragon X Elite has a dedicated TOPS NPU (neural processing unit) for on-device AI that is up to 3x faster than competing x86 chip from Intel.
Generative AI
Qualcomm displayed a range of flagship commercial AI smartphones powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, including the HONOR Magic6 Pro, OPPO X7 Ultra, and Xiaomi 14 Pro. On these devices, it previewed generative AI features such as AI-generated image expansion (Xiaomi), AI-powered video creation and AI-powered calendar creation (HONOR), and image object eraser (OPPO). It also showed the Humane’s AI Pin, powered by the Snapdragon platform, which offers users the ability to take AI with them everywhere in an entirely new, conversational, and screenless form factor.