Qualcomm CEO says AI may breathe new life into smartphones: ‘It could create a new upgrade cycle’
Qualcomm Inc. President and CEO Cristiano Amon speaks during the company’s press event for CES 2022 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on January 4, 2022 in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES, the world’s largest annual consumer technology trade show, is being held in person from January 5-7, with some companies deciding to participate virtually only or canceling their attendance due to concerns over the major surge in COVID-19 cases.
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The CEO of U.S. chip giant Qualcomm thinks artificial intelligence could give the smartphone market a fresh lease on life.
Speaking in an interview with CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal on Tuesday, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said he sees significant opportunity in AI ahead, and that the company’s upcoming Snapdragon Summit in October could lead to major developments in mobile technology.
“The [Snapdragon] Summit is going to be around incredible use cases that we’re seeing from our OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and phones and … could create a new upgrade cycle for phones.”
“We we don’t know the timing, but it’s definitely happening,” Amon said.
Smartphone sales have depreciated this year as consumers have gotten a lot more cost-conscious.
Many are opting not to upgrade their devices, as they see little difference in the phones of today versus older models in the market with already sophisticated cameras and processors.
In 2022, global smartphone sales tumbled 11.3% year-over-year to 1.21 billion, the lowest level since 2013, according to data from market research firm IDC.
“You see what Microsoft’s doing for PCs and think about the ability to run ChatGPT and other models locally,” Amon said. “So, as those things get to the hands of consumers, I think it’s going to be material … we just have to wait.”
Amon said Qualcomm is taking a different path to its arch semiconductor rival Nvidia in the AI space — one that involves bringing AI to smartphones and other devices rather than data centers, an area that Nvidia’s more focused on.
“We’re in a slightly different segment … I think we see an opportunity,” Amon said. “I think that’s going to get reflected once that opportunity materializes. You have not yet materialized it.”
“But it’s important for you to see the activity. You’ve heard a lot about Gen AI. And you see right now with ChhatGPT and those things [and] what’s happening to data center — we’re doing something different. We’re actually bringing AI to the device.”
Beta Technologies shares surged more than 9% after air taxi maker Eve Air Mobility announced an up to $1 billion deal to buy motors from the Vermont-based company.
Eve, which was started by Brazilian airplane maker Embraer and is now under Eve Holding, said the manufacturing deal could equal as much as $1 billion over 10 years. The Florida-based company said it has a backlog of 2,800 vehicles.
Shares of Eve Holding gained 14%.
Eve CEO Johann Bordais called the deal a “pivotal milestone” in the advancement of the company’s electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL, technology.
“Their electric motor technology will play a critical role in powering our aircraft during cruise, supporting the maturity of our propulsion architecture as we progress toward entry into service,” he said in a release.
Mateusz Slodkowski | SOPA Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Amazon’s cloud unit on Tuesday announced AI-enabled software designed to help clients better understand and recover from outages.
DevOps Agent, as the artificial intelligence tool from Amazon Web Services is called, predicts the cause of technical hiccups using input from third-party tools such as Datadog and Dynatrace. AWS said customers can sign up to use the tool Tuesday in a preview, before Amazon starts charging for the service.
The AI outage tool from AWS is intended to help companies more quickly figure out what caused an outage and implement fixes, Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS, told CNBC. It’s what site reliability engineers, or SREs, do at many companies that provide online services.
SREs try to prevent downtime and jump into action during live incidents. Startups such as Resolve and Traversal have started marketing AI assistants for these experts. Microsoft’s Azure cloud group introduced an SRE Agent in May.
Rather than waiting for on-call staff members to figure out what happened, the AWS DevOps Agent automatically assigns work to agents that look into different hypotheses, Sivasubramanian said.
“By the time the on-call ops team member dials in, they have an incident report with preliminary investigation of what could be the likely outcome, and then suggest what could be the remediation as well,” Sivasubramanian told CNBC ahead of AWS’ Reinvent conference in Las Vegas this week.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia has tested the AWS DevOps Agent. In under 15 minutes, the software found the root cause of an issue that would have taken a veteran engineer hours, AWS said in a statement.
The tool relies on Amazon’s in-house AI models and those from other providers, a spokesperson said.
AWS has been selling software in addition to raw infrastructure for many years. Amazon was early to start renting out server space and storage to developers since the mid-2000s, and technology companies such as Google, Microsoft and Oracle have followed.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, these cloud infrastructure providers have been trying to demonstrate how generative AI models, which are often training in large cloud computing data centers, can speed up work for software developers.
Over the summer, Amazon announced Kiro, a so-called vibe coding tool that produces and modifies source code based on user text prompts. In November, Google debuted similar software for individual software developers called Antigravity, and Microsoft sells subscriptions to GitHub Copilot.
WATCH: Amazon rolls out AI-powered tools to help big AWS customers update old software
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