Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon recently dropped a signal in an interview on the show Fireside Alpha: several leading AI companies may be plotting to enter the smartphone business themselves. He revealed that one AI company has already explicitly stated it wants, before 2028, to keep a large model with 100 billion parameters running continuously on a phone, and is actively searching for hardware that can support such an ambition. Amon did not name names, but emphasized that these demands themselves show that AI companies are not satisfied with being merely behind-the-scenes suppliers — they want to step into the spotlight and hold in their own hands the phone, the most personal of screens.
Fitting a 100 billion-parameter model into a palm-sized device involves far more than the single question of "is there enough computing power." Amon pointed out that beyond having to swallow a terrifying demand for compute, power consumption and heat are the real roadblocks — a phone has only so big a battery and so thin a layer of heat dissipation, and once the model runs at full tilt, both heat and battery will rapidly run out. However, he judged that as chip performance rises and AI processing efficiency improves, the scenario of completely casting off the cloud, with all advanced intelligence features completed locally on the device, will increasingly become reality. In other words, future phones may no longer simply toss questions to a large model in the cloud, but instead carry a "brain" in their own belly that can converse at any time.
Outsiders have already followed the clues, listing OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta as the strongest candidates. OpenAI previously announced a partnership with Apple's former design chief Jony Ive to develop AI devices, with rumored forms including a smart speaker with a built-in camera, though it has yet to confirm it is making a phone; Meta's hardware reach extends to VR headsets and smart glasses; while Anthropic has so far announced no consumer-facing hardware plans of its own. No matter who ultimately pulls the trigger first, Amon's remarks have put a trend on the table: once models become small enough to fit in a phone and powerful enough to run locally, the doorway to the phone market may well be crowded by a batch of new players who have never made a phone before.