It’s an AI world out there – are you ready?

AI has been a buzzword for a while now, and many of us have been exposed to different forms of AI at some level or another. Disruptive advancements in AI over the past year or two however, have brought both excitement and concern regarding where this tech is headed and how it’ll impact us. And this is just the beginning, as AI is set to become pervasive, and if Qualcomm is to be believed, 2024 might prove to be the inflection point. Qualcomm, which has already taken big strides in the AI field, is now doubling down on the segment with its new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile SoC and the Snapdragon X Elite compute platform. Announced at the Snapdragon Summit earlier this week, these chipsets boast on-device AI capabilities which enable new features and use cases, and some of the demos on display at the recent Snapdragon Summit showed what this tech can do.

One demo shows how a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3-powered smartphone can shoot 4K video in near darkness, effectively converting night into day and coming up with footage that’s sharp and detailed. In another demo, a smartphone can be seen magically expanding photos, using AI to build up the extra data based on the original image. Yet another demo shows Stable Diffusion in action, generating images as per instructions, all under 1 second, and running completely on the device. An AI assistant using the Skyscanner plugin listens to a series of voice instructions and gets flight bookings done… with the voice instructions uttered in natural language, exactly like how you’d talk to a human assistant. AI assistants run amok on phones and laptops, so to speak, doing their jobs in the blink of an eye, and that too without access to the web – since everything is on device. On-device AI brings several benefits, including speed and efficiency, privacy, personalised results, cost benefits and more. With power comes great responsibility though, and that’s where responsible AI comes into the picture.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 91mobiles (@91mobiles)

One of the key concerns around generative AI involves the authenticity of imagery and the spread of misinformation. While Qualcomm seems to be making big advancements in gen AI, it’s also trying to ensure that users stay in the know regarding the data or information made available to them. Qualcomm’s partnership with Truepic enables signing of images shot or created on Snapdragon-powered smartphones so that users know whether the content they’re consuming is original or AI-generated. Notably, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the first mobile platform which is C2PA compliant. C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity) lays the foundation for tracing the origin of media, and Truepic is a member, along with Adobe, Arm, Intel, and Microsoft. Through its partnership with Truepic and compliance with C2PA, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 attempts to balance both sides of the equation – the power to create, and the responsibility to be transparent.

It’s early days yet as far as gen AI is concerned, and it’s hard to predict how things evolve in the time to come. It’s good to see Qualcomm taking the necessary steps to ensure things stay on the right side of the fence when it comes to AI, a tech that has disruptive power and potential. At the end of the day, however, AI is a tool that gets things done and one needs to be able to learn how to be able use that tool effectively.

Disclosure: this writer attended the Snapdragon Summit in Maui on Qualcomm India’s invitation