Text | Lu Jiu Business Review
At present and for a long time to come, the comprehensive update of the chips behind AI may bring more new ideas to the entire mobile phone industry.
"Golden Nine" high-end machine, "Silver Ten" flagship machine, mobile phone manufacturers this autumn again, hard to use new products to attract users to change phones, seize more market share.
Judging from September alone, Huawei and Apple's two rivals were the new product launch conference on the same day. To put it simply, the highlights of the two sides are: Apple's first AI mobile phone; Huawei, on the other hand, relied on its form factor to release its first triple-fold phone, and the latest Kirin chip is expected to make its debut on the Mate70 series, an AI phone released in October.
Combined with the new selling points launched by major mobile phone manufacturers in the past year or so, it can be seen that folding screen and AI seem to have become a relatively certain competitive direction in the industry.
A senior industry observer told Lu Jiu Business Review that although almost all mobile phone manufacturers set the folding screen as the incision of the high-end route, he also believes that the probability of manufacturers following Huawei's pace to accelerate the launch of three folds is not too large, after all, at the brand mental level, Huawei is a relatively special existence, "In the future, manufacturers will still make more efforts in the direction of AI." ”
AI-driven, melee escalation
If you use "melee" to describe today's mobile phone industry, it is not an exaggeration.
In addition to Huawei, which announced the first three-fold in September, and Apple, which first launched AI mobile phones, the Xiaomi 15 attracted the most attention at the new product launch conference in October. In particular, Lu Weibing, president of Xiaomi Group and president of the mobile phone department, said in his latest remarks that the AI experience of Xiaomi 15 is closer to Chinese users, which can be in stark contrast to Apple products.
Glory also moves frequently. Although the Xiaomi 15 is the first model of the Snapdragon 8 Elite, there is news that the upcoming Honor Magic7 series is also equipped with the Snapdragon 8 Elite. The press conference is imminent, and I am afraid that both sides are tense.
Lu Jiu Business Review found in the communication with mobile phone manufacturers that although most manufacturers will still focus on their own strategic planning and will not deliberately follow Huawei's pace to launch the three-fold, the goal of expanding the mid-to-high-end market with folding machines is still advancing. In particular, with the continuous influx of new products into the market and the gradual decline in prices, folding screen mobile phones are moving from early adopters to commonly used.
Another direction recognized by the industry is that in terms of AI mobile phones, whether as a preliminary exploration or a formal entry into the market, many mobile phone manufacturers have stepped into the AI track since 2023.
Combing through the existing products on the market known as AI mobile phones, it can be seen that the AI mobile phones defined by manufacturers not only have efficient computing capabilities, powerful perception capabilities, independent learning capabilities and creative capabilities, but also provide continuous inspiration and knowledge support, and become intelligent assistants for individual users, which may become the final form of AI mobile phones.
However, the current AI mobile phone is still in the exploration stage, and some AI intelligence is realized through vision and hearing.
At present, the main AI functions of iPhone16 focus on collaborative work between apps, Siri intelligent speech recognition, text and voice editing, and image and video editing. But this is still just a glimpse of a leopard for a real AI phone.
The difference between the functions of the AI mobile phone released by Samsung and Apple's release this time is not big, and the core functions include real-time translation, voice assistant, smart camera, scene recognition, health management, etc. In addition, Samsung's AI phone also has some special features, such as instant circle search, vertical free shooting system, note-taking assistant, simultaneous interpretation function, etc.
It can be seen that although various manufacturers also hope to differentiate themselves in AI mobile phones, the homogeneity of core functions is still relatively serious.
Sun Yanbiao, chairman of Chaodian Think Tank, told Lu Jiu Business Review that from the perspective of the product itself, the homogenization of AI mobile phones is an inevitable trend, and the product functions of both mobile phone manufacturers and telecom operators are basically similar, which is nothing more than focusing on AI processing on the mobile phone or AI processing in the cloud. For consumers, they will ultimately make a choice based on which way of handling is more convenient.
At this stage, whoever has more users will be stronger on the future AI mobile phone track. In Sun Yanbiao's view, the ultimate impact of AI mobile phones is the use habits of consumers. Therefore, the stronger the ability to influence users' consumption habits, the more they can occupy a place in the field of AI mobile phones. Looking at it now, Xiaomi and Apple have more opportunities.
Emphasis on self-research and cooperation
However, it should be emphasized that although the direction of AI has been clear, the computing power of mobile phones still has limitations, and the real pull of AI hardware is actually cloud servers.
Canalys, an international data analysis agency, predicts in the recently released report "The Present and Future of AI Mobile Phones" that AI mobile phones are leading the mobile communications industry to a new stage of development. As the largest application model of AI mobile phones at this stage, the share of generative AI mobile phones in the global market will reach 16% in 2024 and rise to 54% by 2028.
In order to seize this outlet, various manufacturers began to cooperate with large model companies.
Samsung can be called the representative of the "100 family meals" large model dividend. Taking the sixth-generation folding screen phones Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip6 released on July 17 as an example, in addition to the previous cooperation with Baidu Intelligent Cloud, Meitu, and Kingsoft Office, a new volcano engine has been added to access the bean bag model for the intelligent assistant and AI vision of the latest folding screen mobile phone.
After a long period of preparation and negotiations, Apple has finally reached a strategic cooperation with OpenAI, and it is reported that it will introduce ChatGPT to iOS 18 by the end of 2024. At the same time, Apple also rumored that it would join Baidu's Wenxin model, but it is also reported that not only Baidu, Apple is also contacting other large model suppliers at the same time.
Let's take a look at the dynamics of domestic mobile phone manufacturers in the direction of large models.
Earlier, Huawei integrated its own Pangu model into its mobile phones, enabling them to perform complex tasks such as text generation, knowledge search, data summarization, intelligent orchestration, fuzziness, and complex intent understanding.
Lei Jun revealed in his annual speech that in April this year, Xiaomi has set up a large model team, and the large model on the mobile phone side has also been preliminarily run through. Prior to this, Lei Jun had already made it clear that the direction of Xiaomi's research and development of large models is lightweight and local deployment.
Almost at the same time, OPPO also announced a new Xiaobu assistant based on AndesGPT, which is about to start a large-scale experience event. AndesGPT is a generative large language model based on hybrid cloud architecture built by OPPO's Andean Intelligent Cloud team.
Immediately afterwards, vivo launched the blue heart model, which also focuses on lightweight, which is conducive to data processing for mobile phone localization. Honor has launched a self-developed platform-level AI model with 7 billion parameters on the device side.
In order to improve the "intelligence" by expanding the training data, since 2024, major manufacturers have chosen to introduce external large model service providers.
At the beginning of this year, Honor accessed Wenxin Yiyan through YOYO, and it used AI assistants to call large model capabilities; In May, Volcano Engine announced the establishment of a smart terminal model alliance with OPPO, vivo, Honor, Xiaomi, Samsung and Asus. The following month, Xiaomi's artificial intelligence assistant "Xiao Ai" has also reached a cooperation with Volcano Engine. Wait a minute.
According to some public information statistics in the market, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo, and Honor have all accessed the large-scale model products of Ali Tongyi, Baidu Wenxin and Byte Doubao to varying degrees. Industry insiders believe that the direct purpose of mobile phone manufacturers to access different service providers is to quickly improve the performance of mobile phone AI performance with the help of different large models.
The bottom layer also rolls "chips"
When AI becomes the main direction of mobile phone manufacturers, the chip capabilities behind it are also the core of the involution of major manufacturers.
For example, the reason why Huawei's three folds can set the starting price at 19999 yuan is that it uses the self-developed Kirin 9010 chip. It is reported that the new Mate70 series launched in October is not only expected to be equipped with the latest Kirin chip, but also equipped with the new HarmonyOS NEXT system, which uses AI algorithms to realize a variety of intelligent functions such as image recognition and voice assistant.
As Apple's first AI mobile phone, the new Apple 16 is equipped with the A18 chip, which is Apple's second-generation 3nm chip, the A18 chip runs faster than the previous generation by 30%, and the GPU is also 40% faster, and is optimized for running AI large-scale generative models.
However, with the blessing of AI, whether the iPhone 16 series can help Apple start a new "super cycle" has also been marked with a question mark. Lu Jiu Business Review noticed that when the press conference was carried out to introduce the iPhone series products and Apple Intelligence, Apple's stock price turned from rising to falling, and the decline once expanded to more than 1%, and the stock price gradually recovered after the press conference.
On the Android flagship, because the two chip manufacturers in the first echelon of the industry - Qualcomm and MediaTek have firmly chosen the "dual super-large core" and released new products, it also confirms Lu Weibing's view that "this year will be the turning point of the chip industry".
According to the current situation, Qualcomm and MediaTek have officially announced that they will release the next generation of flagship mobile phone chips in October - Qualcomm released Snapdragon 8 Gen 4, MediaTek released Dimensity 9400, and then mobile phone brands will release the first model immediately.
Among them, the vivo X200 series equipped with Dimensity 9400 will launch the first shot of the new flagship machine, which will be released on October 14.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite has also been confirmed to be launched by the Xiaomi 15 series. Although the Xiaomi 15 release time has not yet been announced, it is known that the Snapdragon Summit will be held on October 21 ~ October 23, so the Xiaomi 15 will definitely be released in mid to late October.
The highlight of the Snapdragon 8 Elite is that for the first time, all of them use custom "Phoenix" cores, and the maximum CPU frequency is directly pulled to 4.32GHz, and even the large core has reached 3.52GHz. Specifically, it is composed of two 4.32GHz super-large cores + six 3.52GHz large cores.
At present, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4's running score has been exposed on the Internet, with a single-core score of 3216 points, while a multi-core score of 10051 points. The multi-core has surpassed the Apple A18 Pro, and the single-core is close, as long as the heating/power consumption can be stabilized this time, then it will become the performance king this year.
"2024 is an inflection point for the chip industry, and in the next month or so, everyone will see the emergence of an inflection point." Lu Weibing bluntly said on Weibo in early September that the direction of mobile phone involution this year.
At present and for a long time to come, the comprehensive update of the chips behind AI may bring more new ideas to the entire mobile phone industry.