AI is seemingly in all places nowadays; it is in your cellphone, your TV, laptop, and even your earbuds. The tech continues to be in its infancy, however there are official use instances the place AI makes a distinction — transcribing notes, producing summaries, picture enhancing, and so forth.
It is no shock, then, that Qualcomm is getting in on the motion. The chip producer unveiled the AI Hub again at Cell World Congress, and it’s a platform of AI fashions that may simply be deployed by builders on gadgets working Qualcomm {hardware}, together with Snapdragon 8-powered telephones and numerous IoT gadgets.
With AI Hub, Qualcomm is making it simpler for builders to make the most of AI fashions into their current companies with a minimal of effort. The concept is to offer entry to on-device AI utilities on transportable gadgets, and as such the fashions that Qualcomm is integrating into AI Hub goal use instances like picture recognition and enhancing, producing pictures from textual content prompts, automated speech recognition, and so forth.
To get a greater understanding of what the model is attempting to realize, I talked to Sahil Arora, Qualcomm India’s Senior Enterprise Growth Supervisor, on the sidelines of the Qualcomm India Developer Convention. We began out with the fundamentals: how does AI Hub profit builders?
“We’re taking over plenty of workload that is often dealt with by utility builders, and this makes it simpler for them to get going with AI. So if a developer needs to make use of any specific AI mannequin, we have already got it obtainable within the AI Hub, and these fashions are pre-optimized and pre-tuned; they simply want to make use of a pattern utility to get began. In simply 5 codes of line, they will get began with an AI mannequin,” stated Arora. “We’re mainly serving to builders to deal with arising with new and progressive use instances as a substitute of placing efforts into integrating instruments and AI fashions into their workflow.”
What’s attention-grabbing about the way in which Qualcomm is positioning AI Hub is that if a developer needs to run their very own fashions, they will achieve this simply. “If a developer has already labored on a specific AI mannequin and desires to apply it to a tool, they will simply publish it to the AI Hub and combine it seamlessly,” famous Arora. AI Hub fashions goal Snapdragon 8 sequence gadgets — together with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 — and Qualcomm’s IoT platforms, and the chip vendor is ready to launch these fashions on its Snapdragon X sequence within the coming months.
AI Hub launched with 75 AI fashions, and it now has 95 fashions obtainable to select from, together with the likes of Steady Diffusion, Whisper, ControlNet, and Baichuan 7B. Whereas it is nice that these instruments are simply accessible, I needed to know the way they’re going to have an effect on finish customers. “With these utilities, builders can simply provide in depth personalization and customization choices — resembling increasing an current image’s backdrop, AI translation, or creating AI-assisted backgrounds — with out having to show to the cloud.” stated Arora.
An enormous a part of AI Hub’s attract is that the included fashions are primarily run on-device; Qualcomm showcased use instances like picture object eraser on the OPPO Discover X7 Extremely, AI-assisted picture enlargement with the Xiaomi 14 Extremely, and AI-powered video enhancing with the Honor Magic 6 Professional. Arora famous that Qualcomm sees itself as a “know-how enabler,” and that it delivers the instruments that enables its companions to provide you with distinctive use instances. “AI Hub is not a customer-facing characteristic, nevertheless it has the power to impression plenty of shoppers.”
One of the best half about AI Hub is that Qualcomm is not charging a license to make use of the included AI fashions; they’re free to make use of by all builders. By specializing in generative AI use instances on cellular gadgets, Qualcomm is seeking to provide one other layer of differentiation with its Snapdragon chipsets, and with the upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 touted to ship sizeable positive aspects on this space, it will likely be attention-grabbing to see what next-gen telephones have to supply.
