Qualcomm opened Snapdragon Summit 2024 with a promise to deliver a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI)-first experiences across a variety of platforms, including mobile, PC and augmented reality/extended reality machines.
Opening his speech at the ninth annual meeting of the Snapdragon system-on-chip semiconductor ecosystem, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said that in unleashing tomorrow’s next-generation intelligence, users will no longer need to adapt the technology ; it adapted to them, with next-generation AI being very much about the user and their platform.
“It’s awe-inspiring,” he said. “Within seconds [you can] expand your reality, transform your experiences and slip into something more comfortable, more personal and more powerful. This is the future and the right time.”
Amon highlighted the speed of development of the company’s products over the past year, especially the Oryon CPU – which is now entering its second generation and claimed to set a new standard in terms of performance and power consumption – and the industries in which the Snapdragon product range played a role. increased absorption.
“It’s been about a year since we showed a large language model, a large visualization model and a multimodal model running on the phone,” he said. “We started talking about generative AI [GenAI] on devices before it was popular. So the pace of innovation is really incredible, and I think we’re just getting started. Qualcomm is changing. Qualcomm is in a transformation process. Qualcomm has always been the company that defined the evolution of the wireless industry, but we said we are going to turn Qualcomm into a connected computing company for the era of new AI processing. And I think Snapdragon is evolving with us.
“And what’s exciting about this is that we’re trying to study the pace of innovation – not just in mobile, but in every other sector as well,” Amon said. “Snapdragon started when we needed to create a platform for innovation in mobile, but then we decided to move into the automotive sector.
“We haven’t developed a solution that every other company in the automotive industry does,” he continued. “We built something new in a short time; Snapdragon Digital Chassis became the leading platform that redefined performance in the automotive industry. Then we decided to move into PCs and launched Snapdragon X Elite. And what happened? Snapdragon will become the leading PC platform, and that’s the Snapdragon story, and that’s our mission. [In] with every new sector we enter… we are going to set the pace of innovation in that sector.”
Cycle of innovation
Driven by the innovations taking place in the field of AI, which is considered one of the biggest disruptors in computing, the company, according to Amon, wanted to introduce the concept of computing rooms where GenAI changes the computing experience of what happens at the edge, and how that could disrupt the innovation cycle – which he said would create a new generation of AI-first experiences.
“We are about to see the next big change,” he said. “It’s incredible what you see with it [Gen AI] models, but there is something more than having well-trained models. Computers can now understand human language. Computers can now communicate the way humans communicate. And what that does, it changes the way we think about the experience you have with computing… fundamentally, the way we think about applications and user experience is going to change in a big way with GenAI, and that’s one of the key focuses. [areas] van Snapdragon now and in the future.
“So we have a construct that we’re very used to now, which is an app-centric experience. [Now] every application and use case has the potential to be changed, and how we think about AI… the machines can understand human language. That will be completely redefined and we will see new experiences. It is so clear to us how mobile is going to change. The experience is going to change, and we’re going to see a revolution enabled by AI for experiences.”
Putting this revolution in the context of the devices that will be equipped with the new Snapdragon products, Alex Katouzian, General Manager of the Mobile, Compute and XR (MCX) group, emphasized that people live in a multi-device world and that it is a It is an obvious fact that soon people’s devices will reach a new level of understanding. Moreover, he said the PC industry has reached a tipping point.
“The human-to-machine interface is changing and becoming more intuitive and interactive,” he said. “You’ll have interactions that are more seamless, personalized and helpful than ever before. All the mobile features that consumers value – high performance, multi-day battery life on device AI, great multimedia, thin form factor – are all necessary for the new AI, PC era.”
Mobile platform
The foundation for this new era, Katouzian said, was the Snapdragon 8 Elite mobile platform, which Qualcomm says offers the world’s fastest mobile CPU and is the “most powerful and fastest” mobile system-on-a-chip ever.
The platform sees the introduction of technologies such as the custom second-generation Oryon CPU, Adreno GPU and enhanced Hexagon NPU, all of which Qualcomm says deliver “game-changing” performance improvements. These include personalized, multi-modal generative on-device AI, which enables the understanding of speech, context and images to improve use cases such as business productivity.
The cornerstone for achieving this revolution, Amon noted, will be the partnerships Qualcomm has already created with IT industry leaders such as Microsoft, Meta and OpenAI. In a video message at the event, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized that there is “no doubt” that the industry has entered a new era of computing and that AI at the edge will become even more important.
“Until now, scaling laws have helped us build and operate powerful language models in the cloud, but today we are moving beyond the cloud and to the edge, removing fundamental limitations of power and space, reducing latency and privacy and security are always guaranteed. ” he said.
“This requires collaboration and innovation from the cloud to the edge to deliver these breakthrough solutions and improve people’s productivity and creativity. That’s why our long-term partnership with Qualcomm is so important. Together, Microsoft and Qualcomm are working on software and hardware tools to deliver CoPilot experiences that empower consumers and businesses on every device in this new era.”
Just as Katouzian predicted that the technology now existed to bring about a turning point for the PC market, Amon noted that a similar prospect could be expected in spatial computing, bringing AI-first experiences to all computing spaces. In it, the CEO pointed to the existing partnership with Meta to develop what he believed would be the reality behind the next computing platform, understanding the power of mixed reality (MR) and Meta reality.
“We started early with Meta and we’ve done some fantastic work together with the Meta Quest products, and I think it’s just getting started,” he said. “This is another great collaboration. It’s one that’s based not only on what we’ve done in spatial computing, but also on the potential of an AI-first experience, especially with Llama, and the great work Meta is doing in their apps.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg added: “Together we are pushing the boundaries of what is possible with AI mixed reality and wearables. In terms of AI, we have brought our advanced model of Llama 3.2 to devices containing Snapdragon platforms. That includes our 11 billion parameter multimodal model, along with smaller 1 billion/3 billion parameter models optimized to run on devices. Being able to run Llama on devices is a huge opportunity for the mobile industry. We can move more processing to the edge for AI experiences that are richer and more responsive across all modalities, with added privacy benefits. And this AI work adds to a long-standing partnership in the mixed reality space that dates all the way back to Oculus Go.
“Since then, we have collaborated on custom mixed reality chipsets – powered by Snapdragon XR platforms and technology – to power our quest products, including the new Meta Quest 3s we just launched,” he said. “And we continue to collaborate on the integration of our wearable products, including our Ray-Ban Meta-AI smart glasses. This collaboration unlocks powerful, immersive experiences that will shape the future of human connection.”
Amon said it was easy to see the excitement about how AI is going to fundamentally change everything, and that the industry was just at the beginning of a major revolution. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the conference that since the company launched its ChatGPT product two years ago, the world had changed in some “remarkable” ways, as 250 million people used the company’s flagship product every week.
“We are working to make models much more capable,” he said. “[People will] being able to understand text, images and sounds in multiple languages, multiple modalities, together in real time. Our latest system, OpenAI o1, can now spend more time thinking before responding, so it can reason through complex tasks and, in some cases, solve very difficult problems. This is just a step toward building truly intelligent assistants that are more natural and help navigate the world.”
“On-device AI can enforce privacy guarantees and improve the immediacy and reliability of AI experiences,” Amon said. “We are just scratching the surface of what AI can do as we continue to push the boundaries; I’m very excited about how cloud and on-device AI will come together and unlock new possibilities. This will ensure more people have more powerful information and tools, and ultimately businesses will become more productive, solve problems faster and unlock new ways to be creative.”
In conclusion, he said he was convinced of this future, not just in what Qualcomm said and not just about what Snapdragon will make possible, but also in terms of the big AI companies in the world who were thinking about this future together with Qualcomm.
Potentially critical for businesses, advances are changing the role of computers. Companies will be able to choose their favorite agent, trained in the language they want, a language that better suits the company in terms of productivity. “It’s an incredible future ahead of us,” Amon said. “The best of technology is still ahead of us. And Snapdragon will take center stage and make that a reality; it’s about delivering tomorrow’s experiences today. It’s about making the impossible inevitable.”
