As AI takes hold of your smartphone, the end of the app era could be in sight

• Smartphone makers flooded Mobile World Congress to show off new AI features.
• More AI tools are moving on to devices, which would make them faster and cheaper to run.
• It could push us toward more helpful devices, but it's unclear if it would galvanize mobile sales.
• This article is part of "5G and Connectivity Playbook," a series exploring some of our time's most important tech innovations.

You can't turn a corner at Mobile World Congress 2024 without someone mentioning "artificial intelligence." Those words have been tossed around vaguely in keynotes and roundtables, but one thing has become clear: AI is most definitely coming for our smartphones.

At the tech event in Barcelona, several companies and chipmakers came to demo ways generative-AI tools could be moving into our pockets.

Sure, your phone can already access ChatGPT or Google's Gemini chatbot, but these require an internet connection to offload all the heavy processing.

Now, as the industry looks to capitalize on the AI boom and galvanize a stagnating mobile market, phone makers want the AI tools to run locally on the phone itself.

In theory, it's a win for everyone. If the large language models that power AI are running on the phone instead of a far-off server, everything will run a bit faster, and you won't have to send as much personal data to some remote servers. For the companies making the phones, it gives them a shiny new thing to dangle in front of customers.

Running LLMs is also extremely expensive. Companies are willing to swallow some of the costs now to get their buzzy products in the hands of more users, but that won't be the case for long, especially as more users drive those expenses higher.

"If you look at some of these Morgan Stanley studies, it costs whatever amount of dollars to run a query," Francisco Cheng, the senior director of product marketing at Qualcomm, said. "At some point in time, it's going to reach a tipping point."

Qualcomm doesn't build phones, but it does make the chips that power many of them. The company attended MWC to tout how it's helping phone makers such as Samsung and Honor run more AI tools on their phones.

Cheng said Qualcomm is working primarily with smaller, open-source models, including Meta's LLaMA 7B, which are designed to run on less power-intensive devices.

Samsung was also there, previewing some of the AI tools it's begun to roll out on its phones, including a nifty live-translation feature. Some, like Xiaomi, were showing off video-editing tools that could erase unwanted photobombers from your family vacation pics in just a few seconds.

The AI boom is well-timed. Smartphone sales saw a two-year slump between 2022 and 2023, though there are signs of a recent recovery. Still, it remains a challenging market, particularly as users wait longer to upgrade their phones, and new AI features — whether running entirely on the phone or in tandem with the cloud — have the potential to give the sector a shot in the arm.

Google Assistant and Siri once promised us a future where our smartphones behaved more like personal concierges, but that has so far failed to materialize.

At MWC, it feels like device makers are once again toying with that idea. Companies like Motorola showed concepts for personalized AI assistants that can do everything from scheduling tasks to waking you up before your alarm because it knows traffic on your commute will be particularly bad.

Some of these concepts, such as Motorola's MotoAI, run entirely locally. Francisco Jeronimo, an IDC analyst, told Business Insider that fully personalized AI smartphone assistants are the logical endpoint of all this, which is why keeping personal data on-device will be so important.

"What Samsung, Xiaomi, and others are announcing is a step forward, but it's not yet the intelligent phone we will see in the future, where it's a truly digital personal assistant where the phone adapts to your use," Jeronimo said.

Some are already imagining what that future looks like. Deutsche Telekom and Brain.ai were at MWC and demoed a smartphone that ditches apps entirely for an AI interface. Rather than swiping or tapping apps, the user types or gives voice commands for a particular task (one demo showed the AI responding to a request to "Create a cool image of a soccer ball" and producing a set of AI-generated images).

"Over the last 10 years it was all about how many apps are available out there that can help us," said Jeronimo. "Now? The fewer apps, the better the phone."