Seriously, what possible actual, real life use case does the average user (even Pixel user) have? Image processing, maybe, but that’s nothing groundbreaking.
Every single demo of anything AI related I’ve seen is nothing more than a nice demo. Impressive, but still just a demo.
Think about, what are you actually doing with your phone that’s so much different from what you did 5 or 10 years ago? Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I use literally 80% of the very same apps. Do these need ai on my phone? Not really.
AI is already in a lot of people’s lifes and they don’t even notice it’s that.
From your keyboard word correction and prediction, to power management, smart image edition and categorising and more.
And some things are done locally on your phone.
The increase in AI capability on phones can allow more things to be done locally, and maybe even get something like a local LLM to predict what you want to type. (LLM = large language model, like chatgpt, bard, Llama and others, they can be used for more than just answering your questions).
Yeah, and how much do you want that on your phone? And how many people do you think want/need that on their phones?
I can tell you, I’m a software developer and there’s currently maybe one product in my workflow that involves ai, and I’m not even sure about that one. Sure, that might change in the future, but not on my phone. Why would it?
AI is not magic. It has its uses, but the current iterations offer nothing even remotely relevant for the average user to have on their phone.
This is a completely different question then the one I responded to.
What do you think a “Pixel 8” is exactly? A phone maybe?
But the current iteration" is the operative statement here, and I have a feeling you have an overinflated sense of how dominant your mentality is.
It’s not “mentality”, it’s actually roughly knowing the field and not just throwing words around. LLMs for example are the current iteration. Not chatgpt version XY. And LLMs already kind of hit a wall, there’s not much progress expected in the next time. Stable Diffusion and others are also rather stable and won’t turn out massive improvements any time soon. We’re at the rapidly diminishing returns phase here.
But now the actual kicker: give me a single “killer feature” for ai that normal people would actually have run on their phone and be willing to spend money on. Siri is nice and all, but it’s already running locally, there’s no need for a new phone. Photo editing, yeah, nice, but do you buy a phone because of it?
Again, I’m not saying that ai is “bad”, but I see no reason for the hype in the mobile space, especially in the “you need new hardware for that” sense.
And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.
It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.
Most of the normal apps on the phone are using AI on the edges.
Image processing has come a long way using algorithms trained through those AI techniques. Not just the postprocessing of pictures already taken, like unblurring faces, removing unwanted background people, choosing a better frame of a moving picture, white balance/color profile or noise reduction, but also in the initial capture of the image: setting the physical focus/exposure on recognizable subjects, using software-based image stabilization in longer exposed shots or in video, etc. Most of these functions are on-device AI using the AI-optimized hardware on the phones themselves.
On-device speech recognition, speech generation, image recognition, and music recognition has come a long way in the last 5 years, too. A lot of that came from training on models using big, robust servers, but once trained, executing the model on device only requires the AI/ML chip on the phone itself.
In other words, a lot of these apps were already doing these things before on-device AI chips started showing up in 2013 or so. But the on-device chips have made all these things much, much better, especially in the last 5 years when almost all phones started coming with dedicated hardware for these tasks.
The truth is there is little in terms of a use case that directly benefits the user.
Look at the MKBHD review of the new iPhone and he summarizes it pretty accurately when talking about all their super fancy backend bullshit going into the photo software to result in “slightly better pictures” and he wasn’t even 100% sure about that part.
Apples Neural Engine delivered marginal value to the phones actual user and meanwhile the tech company harnessed that power mostly to do client-side scanning. They claimed to have ceased that effort but once again, blackbox proprietary software, so it isn’t transparent to the user.
My contention is that at this point the big tech companies are developing features to benefit their business model, not deliver features to the users. The marketing and surveillance state grows, because that is the real business that these companies are in. Most of the AI gains we hear about benefit them directly but not us.
Actually, I think the real reasons are far less “evil” than you might think: It’s marketing. People fall for that.
Phones don’t improve really, haven’t for quite some time, but you still have to sell new ones. So you add bullshit features or advertise pseudo-improvements. I mean, Apple is currently marketing, that their side button is now programmable! Wow!
Who actually gives a crap about AI in real life?
Seriously, what possible actual, real life use case does the average user (even Pixel user) have? Image processing, maybe, but that’s nothing groundbreaking.
Every single demo of anything AI related I’ve seen is nothing more than a nice demo. Impressive, but still just a demo.
Think about, what are you actually doing with your phone that’s so much different from what you did 5 or 10 years ago? Maybe I’m a weirdo, but I use literally 80% of the very same apps. Do these need ai on my phone? Not really.
I don’t think you look at it from the right way.
AI is already in a lot of people’s lifes and they don’t even notice it’s that.
From your keyboard word correction and prediction, to power management, smart image edition and categorising and more.
And some things are done locally on your phone.
The increase in AI capability on phones can allow more things to be done locally, and maybe even get something like a local LLM to predict what you want to type. (LLM = large language model, like chatgpt, bard, Llama and others, they can be used for more than just answering your questions).
deleted by creator
Yeah, and how much do you want that on your phone? And how many people do you think want/need that on their phones?
I can tell you, I’m a software developer and there’s currently maybe one product in my workflow that involves ai, and I’m not even sure about that one. Sure, that might change in the future, but not on my phone. Why would it?
AI is not magic. It has its uses, but the current iterations offer nothing even remotely relevant for the average user to have on their phone.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
What do you think a “Pixel 8” is exactly? A phone maybe?
It’s not “mentality”, it’s actually roughly knowing the field and not just throwing words around. LLMs for example are the current iteration. Not chatgpt version XY. And LLMs already kind of hit a wall, there’s not much progress expected in the next time. Stable Diffusion and others are also rather stable and won’t turn out massive improvements any time soon. We’re at the rapidly diminishing returns phase here.
But now the actual kicker: give me a single “killer feature” for ai that normal people would actually have run on their phone and be willing to spend money on. Siri is nice and all, but it’s already running locally, there’s no need for a new phone. Photo editing, yeah, nice, but do you buy a phone because of it?
Again, I’m not saying that ai is “bad”, but I see no reason for the hype in the mobile space, especially in the “you need new hardware for that” sense.
deleted by creator
Consider it, but not buying a new phone because of it.
Do you think, someone would pay an extra 50€ just for slightly better editing capabilities all else being equal?
deleted by creator
And it won’t need to exist locally on the phone anyway. Higher bandwidth cell and wifi signals mean more and more exotic AI processing can be offloaded onto cloud resources.
It’s great when you have an app that works well when not connected to a network, of course. But most phone buyers don’t really care.
Most of the normal apps on the phone are using AI on the edges.
Image processing has come a long way using algorithms trained through those AI techniques. Not just the postprocessing of pictures already taken, like unblurring faces, removing unwanted background people, choosing a better frame of a moving picture, white balance/color profile or noise reduction, but also in the initial capture of the image: setting the physical focus/exposure on recognizable subjects, using software-based image stabilization in longer exposed shots or in video, etc. Most of these functions are on-device AI using the AI-optimized hardware on the phones themselves.
On-device speech recognition, speech generation, image recognition, and music recognition has come a long way in the last 5 years, too. A lot of that came from training on models using big, robust servers, but once trained, executing the model on device only requires the AI/ML chip on the phone itself.
In other words, a lot of these apps were already doing these things before on-device AI chips started showing up in 2013 or so. But the on-device chips have made all these things much, much better, especially in the last 5 years when almost all phones started coming with dedicated hardware for these tasks.
The truth is there is little in terms of a use case that directly benefits the user.
Look at the MKBHD review of the new iPhone and he summarizes it pretty accurately when talking about all their super fancy backend bullshit going into the photo software to result in “slightly better pictures” and he wasn’t even 100% sure about that part.
Apples Neural Engine delivered marginal value to the phones actual user and meanwhile the tech company harnessed that power mostly to do client-side scanning. They claimed to have ceased that effort but once again, blackbox proprietary software, so it isn’t transparent to the user.
My contention is that at this point the big tech companies are developing features to benefit their business model, not deliver features to the users. The marketing and surveillance state grows, because that is the real business that these companies are in. Most of the AI gains we hear about benefit them directly but not us.
Actually, I think the real reasons are far less “evil” than you might think: It’s marketing. People fall for that.
Phones don’t improve really, haven’t for quite some time, but you still have to sell new ones. So you add bullshit features or advertise pseudo-improvements. I mean, Apple is currently marketing, that their side button is now programmable! Wow!