في مقابلة مع مجلة Inc. Arabia، يتحدث رامي عثمان، مدير تطوير الأعمال لمنطقة الشرق الأوسط وأفريقيا في MediaTek، ودارين تشين، مدير التخطيط الاستراتيجي لتكنولوجيا الذكاء الاصطناعي في OPPO، عن آفاق الهواتف الذكية المدعومة بالذكاء الاصطناعي والتحديات التي تواجه شركات تصنيع الهواتف ومصنعي الرقائق أثناء عملهم لمواكبة احتياجات المستهلكين المتطورة.
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00:00My name is Rami Othman. I'm the Regional Director of Business Development and Technical Support for MediaTek in the Middle East and Africa region.
00:10MediaTek is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world.
00:14As a matter of fact, we are the largest supplier of smartphone chipsets globally.
00:19I'm Darren Chen. I'm AI Technology Strategy Director at OPPO.
00:30My responsibilities at OPPO is to work with team on AI technology strategy, especially focusing on the roadmap and partnership.
00:40AI features in OPPO Reno12 series, which we have just launched, I think actually there's a lot of AI features.
00:49Just like, you know, the generative AI allows AI to process text, voice, and images as well.
00:59And so all the AI features are related to that.
01:02We released, you know, in our AI toolbox, which was in the smart sidebar, and we have AI speaker, AI summarize, and we can do recording summary.
01:14We can't talk about the AI features in the Reno12 series without talking about the underlying machine, which is the CPU, also known as SoC system on a chip.
01:30But more accurately, I think we should call it the NPU, because it's the Neural Network Processing Unit.
01:39It's the kind of artificial intelligence processing unit that mimics the human's brain way of working, where the neurons in our brains exchange information in electrical signals.
01:57In the past, technologies first used to be, you know, born on the desktop, and then they moved to, you know, laptop, et cetera, and then to mobile.
02:06But now AI suddenly is so important and so effective in our mobile devices.
02:13Everybody is, you know, trying to identify the hero use cases.
02:18And so I think the last two years' major milestone was, you know, large language model running on the edge with the processors by Mediatek and other companies.
02:31This is the era of the AI phone, and this was caused by the, introduced by the technology of generative AI.
02:43And this is, they always, you know, when the evolution happens, there's always not one single technologies can make it happen.
02:54The generative AI is a key motivation, but also we have the SOCs.
03:01They need to support the technology landing on the smartphone, and they need the 5G connections.
03:09They can allow the hybrid AI to work on the smartphone.
03:14So these, I think, are all the milestones that brings the technology to our users.
03:21AI phone market is growing significantly.
03:25At the end of this year, IDC, from IDC's prediction, it will have 170 million AI phones in the global market.
03:37And what OPPO is looking into is, you know, those price segment below U.S. dollar 1,000.
03:48That means most people can benefit from the price segment, the AI phones.
03:55OPPO's strategy is make AI phone accessible to everyone.
04:01So we are trying everything to democratize it.
04:05We are aiming to make generative AI feature accessible to all OPPO smartphone product lines.
04:19The chipset design takes around three years to complete.
04:23If you make a wrong decision, this is disaster.
04:27So our R&D and our regional team keeps always finger on the pulse to sense the consumer requirements,
04:37which we collect not only from the consumers, we collect from the media and press like you,
04:43collect from our design and manufacturing partners like OPPO,
04:47so that we could adjust the chipset design or the chipset specification during the project lifecycle itself.
04:58Moving from the first few generations of the virtual assistant into the next generation, the AI virtual assistant.
05:06What we are trying to do with our partners is to move into a proper AI virtual assistant.
05:12And as Darren was saying, it also relates to the sensors on the device.
05:17And one of the most important sensors of input devices is the microphone.
05:22And we've been all facing problems in the communication with the assistant.
05:26And if they cannot communicate with the assistant properly with our different accents and noise environments,
05:34then even after I don't know how many years now, more than half a decade,
05:38still our relationship with our personal assistant is not so good.
05:42One area that I think should come, maybe the consumers don't know that,
05:48but we feel it as MediaTek and OPPO and other players, technology players, is the complexity of the models.
05:56So the large language models for generative AI in particular are becoming too many.
06:05And the load on the memory and the APU is too high.
06:10So probably we need to work all together to kind of standardize, simplify, to share in that layer.
06:21We have to continue pushing the boundaries of R&D to keep the capability of the smartphone within the same size,
06:32the same form factor and the same price.
06:34If you want to look into the future and try to predict what are the AI capabilities that will come into a smartphone,
06:41as we've been hearing today, the term AI phone is starting to be used.
06:48So maybe it will become the future of the smartphone.