If there was one reason why many digital assistants on our phones didnāt take off in a big way was because they largely required remote processing, meaning that your command had to be sent to a remote server to be processed before coming back to you. This resulted in a slight delay which didnāt feel very good or as intuitive.
This is something that MediaTek is hoping to change in future phones powered by its chipsets. The company has announced that they will be working closely with Meta to leverage the companyās Llama 2 models to bring on-device generative AI to future devices.
There are several benefits to on-device generative AI. For starters, speed would be the most obvious. Since everything is done on your device, you donāt have to worry about internet connectivity (at least to a certain degree) since everything will be processed locally. Secondly, it ensures greater privacy because all your AI requests will be handled on your device instead of some remote server which could be hacked or breached.
MediaTek isnāt alone in their efforts though. Just last month Qualcomm announced a similar partnership with Meta for on-device AI, so it looks like if you are planning on buying a phone in the next year or two that is either powered by a Qualcomm or MediaTek chipset, then on-device generative AI will be a feature you can expect.
MediaTek notes that they expect Llama 2-based AI apps to be available for phones powered by their next-gen flagship chipset which should be hitting the market by the end of the year.