In recent years new phone releases have become relatively low-key affairs, each one serving-up another slab of black glass with an extra camera lens or hour of battery life. But AI features and new shapes and sizes of device are rejuvenating mobile computing.
Microsoft this week unveiled the Phi-3 family of models, including the compact Phi-3 Mini. It’s small enough to run on a mid-range phone, and yet appears to compete with the larger Llama 3, Mistral, and even OpenAI models across various benchmarks. The trick is in the ultra-high quality curated dataset used to train it. Beyond the training approach, this is significant because it moves us toward realising the idea of ‘ambient intelligence,’ where AI more seamlessly integrates into our lives, transforming our mobile computers from communication and entertainment tools to intelligent companions.
The concept of ambient intelligence envisions a world where AI is omnipresent, ‘always-on,’ continuously recording, and then instantly responsive. AI is gradually breaking free from its chat window boundaries as companies like Samsung and Motorola unveil mobile devices with built-in capabilities. Today these advancements enable enhanced features such as translations, smart search, and creative photography, processed both on-device and in the cloud. Mckinsey predicts that by the end of the year as many as 50% of the interactions we have with our phones will be AI augmented. But by processing AI workloads fully on the device, users will enjoy faster, private, and offline experiences while in the future benefiting from extra intelligent personalisation.
Samsung has confirmed that the upcoming Galaxy S25 smartphones will feature more on-device AI capabilities powered by Google’s Gemini Nano 2. Meanwhile Microsoft is making overtures to the Korean giant and they may team up to work on the next generation of mobile AI silicon.
But most eyes are on Apple’s WWDC conference in June to find out how the firm plans to reclaim its mojo. Apple has been investing heavily in model research and serving the developer ecosystem, and also making acquisitions, this week picking up a firm specialising in on-device vision processing. But iOS 18 is going to be the make-or-break event. While Samsung uses a mix of on-device and cloud-powered AI, Apple plans to rely more on its own local LLM although intriguingly has also been linked with both Google and Anthropic’s tech.
Meanwhile news this week suggested that Apple is scaling back it is work on the Vision Pro VR system. The demand and compelling use cases have been lacking. This kind of super-immersive experience is perhaps the antithesis of ambient computing, and it seems for now humans prefer to balance external awareness with virtual interaction for most tasks. We’ve had ambient computing of a sort with Alexa and other voice assistants for a while, but they have lacked the intelligence to be subtle or proactive, generally causing annoyance when they stray from simple commands. Amazon demonstrated an LLM powered Alexa in September but this has yet to see wide deployment.
It is not certain the ‘phone’ as we know it will always be the dominant personal platform. There are new AI powered wearables emerging that may deliver ambient intelligence in more seamless ways. Whilst the Humane Pin has received catastrophically bad reviews, the Llama 3 powered multi-modal upgrade to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses is getting much more positive press, as is the odd but apparently fun Rabbit R1. We’ve tried the Ray-Bans, and they provide a practical and real-world solution for more continuous access to audio and visual capture and analysis, although won’t be AI enabled in the UK until later in the year. Ambient AI is all about simplicity, and at ExoBrain we can’t wait for our pre-ordered Limitless pendants to ship. Meanwhile we’ve been testing the Llama models on the Android platform and the reality is that these larger models are not quite efficient enough yet to work on-device, but that will soon change. With faster chips and smaller smarter models, the next device generation is shaping up to be a fascinating step-change.
Takeaways: Unless you have a very recent phone, mobile AI is still mostly app and web based. ChatGPT, Perplexity search, Copilot and Poe are the mainstays of on the Apple and Google app stores, with user star ratings and downloads roughly in that order. (Notable by their absences are Claude and Gemini). There are also an increasing number of character-centric AI apps appearing in the mobile charts alongside the mapping, writing, creative and generation tools. This is a space we will no doubt cover in the future as our mobile devices not only act as practical helpers, but perhaps also as social or psychological companions.