Qualcomm CEO: LLMs Coming to Personal Devices, CES 2024

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said the next step for generative AI is at the edge – on consumer electronics devices.

During a keynote speech at CES 2024, Amon said that generative AI is entering only its second inning (out of nine in a baseball analogy). This phase will be characterized by large language models running on devices like smartphones.

“The AI is going to develop differently from the cloud and the devices,” said the chipmaker’s CEO. He said people currently access ChatGPT and other generative AI models in the cloud, but “on the device, the AI is running pervasively.”

That means an AI model running on a smartphone would take all your data from the device to continuously learn from it and predict what you will do next – essentially becoming your own personal AI assistant specializing in your life.

In the cloud, generative AI does not know things like your location, your behaviors and other personal information.

“Everything that you type (on your phone) could be a query for the AI,” Amon said.

For example, if you text a friend asking to get together, the AI could check your availability and even suggest places to go based on places you have visited in the past. Or if you tell a friend about a place you visited, the AI could bring up the photos and ask if you want to share them.

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“That is very exciting and transformative,” Amon said.

“It is going to be this assistant with you that is running pervasively,” he said. That means the response will be instant, and since the data will stay on your device, it will remain private, Amon added.

He said Qualcomm’s X Elite PC platform that features its Oryon CPU can run generative AI models with up to 13 billion parameters on the device. PCs with this chip should start shipping from manufacturers in mid-2024.

Here, “generative AI is actually a tailwind,” Amon said. “We put ourselves on a mission, in a partnership with Microsoft to build next-generation PCs.”

X Elite PCs can run Microsoft’s generative AI assistant, Copilot.

“As Windows changes to an AI and a Copilot experience, X Elite is the platform that is going to take that next-generation Windows experience to consumers,” said Amon.