Qualcomm is bringing local AI to Android and 5G to more devices

Mobile World Congress kicks off today and as you would expect, Qualcomm has plenty to show this year. With the whole tech world moving towards AI, we've seen plenty of new PC hardware designed with AI acceleration in mind. Now, Qualcomm wants to bring those same AI capabilities to mobile devices.

We'll start off with Qualcomm's new AI Hub, which is a free tool for developers to access over 75 AI and generative AI models to aid in building AI powered features for applications, all while being optimised to run efficiently on Snapdragon chips. Features like live translation and transcription could be utilised using AI locally without the need for an internet or data connection.

The AI Hub is a “comprehensive AI model library” of over 75 different AI and generative AI models, built to help developers “quickly and easily integrate pre-optimized AI models into their applications,” according to Qualcomm. Adding the models in some cases should be as simple as adding a few lines of code, Qualcomm claims, and they're all explicitly optimized to run efficiently on Qualcomm's Snapdragon platforms. At MWC this week, Qualcomm will be showing off the world's first AI large language model to run on an Android phone. The company will also be showing off an LMM with audio reasoning capabilities, running on a Windows PC, presumably powered by a Snapdragon X Elite processor, which will be available in Windows laptops later this year.

In a preview last week, Qualcomm said that its Snapdragon X Elite chip can deliver 3x faster image generation using GIMP and Stable Diffusion, compared to an Intel Core Ultra processor, so we're expecting to see some very interesting competition in the laptop space later this year as the Snapdragon X Elite begins to roll out. We should see much more on this at Computex this Summer, as Qualcomm CEO, Cristiano Amon, is due to host a keynote at the event, focused on the Snapdragon X Elite. Presumably, various OEMs will also begin showing off their laptop designs around this time too.

Moving on to connectivity, Qualcomm has also unveiled its new FastConnect 7900, utilising WiFi 7 and AI powered QoS to handle traffic efficiently without inspecting the contents of packets. The Snapdragon X80 5G Advanced Model is another new smart piece of tech, enabling Gigabit 5G speeds on cheaper devices, using satellite communication to speed up signal acquisition.

The final product we'll be focusing on in this article is the Qualcomm 5G Fixed Wireless Access Gen 3 Ultra. This device can be used to add 5G connectivity to fixed items, like PCs, with an antenna inside the housing that moves to lock on to the best available signal.

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KitGuru Says: If you needed proof that the AI market is moving fast, this is it. In just a few years we've moved from AI processing being limited to massive data centres, to being locally run on PCs, to now being supported on mobile devices. Now we'll have to see what developers can do with all of this new hardware.

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