The majority of Samsung’s latest Galaxy AI capabilities operate on cloud servers.
The Galaxy S24 family of smartphones has been introduced by Samsung, and as was to be expected, artificial intelligence plays a significant role in the plot. The new Galaxy AI offering from Samsung promises to make your Android phone more intelligent by providing features such as the ability to translate languages, improve your writing, edit photographs, and more. This effort could be doomed due to the inefficiencies of generative artificial intelligence, which Samsung wants to make a must-have feature in order to boost sales of smartphones that have been on the decline. It is abundantly evident that the Galaxy S24 does not include any AI features that are entirely unique when one considers the manner in which Galaxy AI is implemented.
Over the course of the past few years, manufacturers of semiconductors have been pushing the power of neural processing units, also known as NPUs. On-device machine learning has achieved new heights thanks to chips such as Intel Meteor Lake and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 that are contained within the S24. However, how strong are these neural processing units (NPUs)? Evidently, not powerful enough to do the job. A small number of the Galaxy AI functions are dependent on the hardware of your phone. The remaining ones are directed toward the cloud, where Samsung has formed a partnership with Google to make use of its new Gemini large language model on the cloud.
There are a number of capabilities that Samsung plans to include in Galaxy AI. These include an interpreter, chat assistant, note assistant, generative editor, instant slow-motion, transcript assistant, and circle to search. There are several of these functions that have been around for a while and have been accessible on other devices without the need for fancy AI marketing. You may install translation apps to take the place of Interpreter, while Circle to Search is simply a more simple way to access Google Image search. Both of these capabilities are available to you.
However, the remaining applications are legal applications of artificial intelligence technology that, in theory, might make your phone smarter. On the other hand, is it really the phone that is becoming more intelligent? It is a powerful server that is performing all of the hard lifting, so even though the Galaxy S24 has a neural processing unit (NPU), several of these capabilities are only functional when there is an internet connection. Simply producing an image with artificial intelligence might need a surprising amount of power.
When it comes to Chat Assist, you have the ability to translate messages on your smartphone; however, if you want the artificial intelligence to compose or improve your responses, you will require an internet connection. Interested in experimenting with Samsung’s latest generative picture editing? Since the on-device neural processing unit (NPU) does not appear to be powerful enough, the phone will make a connection to the cloud in order to improve and enhance your image. Even features that give the impression of being straightforward, such as the formatting and summary capabilities of Note Assist, require the power of the cloud. According to Samsung, it processes your data but does not store it under these conditions.
Moreover, it is possible that this hybridization of local and cloud-based artificial intelligence was done on purpose. Within the fine print of Samsung’s website, the company discreetly states that the Galaxy AI capabilities will only be guaranteed to be free until the year 2025 comes to a close. After then, you might have to pay a fee in order to access Galaxy AI, which is dependent on the cloud in order to function! It is far more difficult to charge customers a monthly fee when you have already sold them the essential computing hardware; however, when Samsung has AI server expenses to pay, all bets are off; the situation is completely different.