At Mobile World Congress (MWC) Barcelona this week, Qualcomm made several announcements regarding its latest developments in on-device AI, signaling the company's commitment to leading the way in enabling intelligence across a wide range of devices and industries.
A key announcement was the launch of Qualcomm AI Hub, a new platform providing developers with access to over 75 optimized AI models that can be readily implemented into apps running on devices powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platforms. This represents a major step forward in allowing developers to tap into the benefits of on-device AI such as improved privacy, reliability and efficiency.
"The Qualcomm AI Hub provides developers with a comprehensive AI model library to quickly and easily integrate pre-optimized AI models into their applications, leading to faster, more reliable and private user experiences," said Durga Malladi, SVP at Qualcomm.
The models available span capabilities including speech, language, audio, vision and multimodal understanding. Qualcomm also showcased cutting-edge generative AI research running on smartphones and PCs leveraging large multimodal models with billions of parameters.
On the connectivity front, Qualcomm revealed its latest Snapdragon X80 5G Modem-RF System which uniquely integrates a dedicated AI processor for optimizing 5G performance across metrics like speed, latency, coverage and efficiency.
Additionally, Qualcomm announced its new FastConnect 7900 mobile connectivity system, the first solution to combine Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth chipsets with AI-based optimizations. FastConnect 7900 is designed to dynamically adapt its performance based on factors like power consumption and environment to provide the best user experience.
Cristiano Amon, CEO of Qualcomm, summed up the opportunity afforded by this tight coupling of AI and wireless connectivity: "The future of generative AI is hybrid, with on-device intelligence working together with the cloud...Connectivity is critical to help generative AI scale."
With these technology building blocks in place across AI, 5G and Wi-Fi, Qualcomm made clear its intention to spur widespread commercialization of on-device intelligence. From AI-powered image generation on smartphones to faster AI photo editing on PCs to autonomous driving applications, MWC 2024 is providing a glimpse into the emerging era of pervasive intelligent computing.