Qualcomm imagines 6G will power tomorrow’s AI boom. Just ignore today’s AI in the meantime.
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told the assembled crowd at its Snapdragon Summit in Maui, Hawaii (full disclosure: travel and lodging were paid by Qualcomm, and Gizmodo did not guarantee any coverage as a condition of accepting the trip), that the world can set its watch and clear its calendar for the next generation of wireless connectivity. You’ll just have to wait a while. Currently, 5G and 4G LTE are the standard the world over. 6G could allow for faster internet speeds, and the first “pre-commercial devices” with the standard will be here in three years. For so many reasons, I don’t have much to look forward to in that time.
I don’t enjoy considering the ramifications of 2028. There will be a new round of presidential elections (or maybe not, depending on the authoritarian compulsions of the U.S. commander in chief) that may exacerbate today’s political tensions. By then, the always overpromising Sam Altman from OpenAI could be shoving AGI—aka “artificial general intelligence”—in our faces (other major tech CEOs are far more doubtful). Today’s tech environment is so muddled and so tenuous that the idea of having any sure idea of the next generation of wireless data seems so much more uncertain. Qualcomm, of course, imagines 6G will have something—anything—to do with AI.
Because of course it is. Qualcomm has chips in a lot of different products, with the majority of them in Android phones.
