With each successive phone release,

AI-enabled functions on smartphones become further decoupled from the cloud.

 

 

 

The most recent of these was the Google Pixel 9, the company’s flagship phone. Furthermore, the Samsung Galaxy S24 phone, which debuted in the beginning of 2024, offers a plethora of AI-powered photo-editing features.

The untold tale of these gadgets is how businesses moved the processing needed for these artificial intelligence features from the cloud to the palm of your hand.

Users of the Google Pixel 9 phone may “re-imagine” their photographs with generative AI thanks to a function called Magic Editor.

Practically speaking, this means you can rearrange the subject of the image, take someone out of the background, or replace the drab gray sky with a blue one. All you have to do is provide the app with the necessary cues, and it will handle the rest.

By entering in a text prompt, you may also add people or objects to your photographs using the phone’s generative AI features.

Of course, users have always been able to accomplish this with picture editing software, but it requires talent to make the changed image appear natural and unaltered. These intricate photo alterations will be made using AI, according to Magic Editor, using “simple and intuitive actions.”

“Add Me,” another function, lets users create group photos without giving your phone to a stranger. The owner of the phone just takes a picture of the group, delivers it to a friend, and enters the area they just snapped a picture of. After then, the phone merges the two images.

An additional function known as “Best Take” allows you to curate the best aspects from a set of remarkably similar photos and merge them into a single image. The phone’s digital assistant and other features are powered by Google’s chatbot technology.

Since the first digital phones, or when phones first began to include built-in cameras, phone features have advanced significantly.

Up to the brink

Until recently, it was impossible to host the computing necessary for these AI-based capabilities on a phone or other small device. It is instead delegated to internet cloud services that are run by sizable, potent computer servers.

Nonetheless, businesses are realizing more and more that a large portion of the processing must be done on client devices, potentially giving customers more power.

This entails moving a sizable portion of AI computational power to the “edge,” as some businesses refer to it. The term “edge” refers to lower processing performance consumer electronics, such as phones.

The ways in which edge-based and cloud-based artificial intelligence differ:

Reducing the processing power demands is necessary to achieve this. Businesses have made this transition thanks to customized microprocessors designed for AI-based workflows.

Tensor processing units (TPUs), which are Google’s Tensor AI processors, seem to be at the heart of the functionality offered on its Pixel smartphones, for example. With the help of specialized software, edge-based processors may effectively apply AI models to data that has been collected or saved on mobile devices.

These TPUs can handle massive amounts of data at once due to a certain kind of network of components called systolic arrays. This efficient architecture saves processing power and time.

This is important since an AI decision requires a lot of computational power.

 In the past few years, processors have gotten significantly better at this, as seen with Google’s TPUs.

In fact, the original purpose of TPUs, which were built in 2015, was to aid in the acceleration of calculations carried out by sizable cloud-based servers during the training of artificial intelligence models. Google introduced the first TPUs intended for computers at the “edge” in 2018. Then, for the Google Pixel, the first TPUs made for phones reappeared in 2021.

There is intense rivalry to incorporate more artificial intelligence into smartphones. This implies that in the upcoming years, even more cutting-edge technology is probably going to be released onto the market.

 

 

 

As supplied by The Conversation