Personal AI can redefine the handheld experience and perhaps preserve privacy too
Column Smartphone innovation has plateaued. The iPhone 15, launched overnight, has some nice additions. But my iPhone 13 will meet my needs for a while and I won’t rush to replace it. My previous iPhone lasted four years.
Before that phone I could justify grabbing Cupertino’s annual upgrade. These days, what do we get? The iPhone 15 delivered USB-C, a better camera, and faster wireless charging. It’s all nice, but not truly necessary for most users.
Yet smartphones are about to change for the better – thanks to the current wild streak of innovation around AI.
Pretty much everyone with a smartphone can already access the “Big Three” AI chatbots – OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing Chat and Google’s Bard – through an app or browser.
That works well enough. Yet alongside these “general purpose” AI chatbots, a subterranean effort – spearheaded by another of the behemoths of big tech – looks to be gaining the inside track.
Back in February, Meta AI Labs released LLaMA – a large language model scaled down both in its training data set and in its number of parameters. Our still-rather-poorly-intuited understanding of how large language models work equates a greater number of parameters with greater capacity – GPT-4, for example, is thought to have a trilion or more parameters, though OpenAI is tight-lipped about those numbers.
