Smartphone giants like Samsung are going to talk up ‘AI phones’ this year — here’s what that means
Samsung Electronics Co. Galaxy S24 smartphones during a media preview event in Seoul, South Korea, on Monday, Jan. 15, 2024. Samsung, the world’s most prolific smartphone maker, is leaning into artificial intelligence as the key to unlocking greater sales this year. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Artificial intelligence phones: these are the buzzwords you’ll likely hear this year, as smartphone players look to jump on the AI hype to boost sales of their devices after a difficult stretch of time.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparked huge interest in generative AI, specifically — models trained on huge amounts of data that are able to produce text, images and prompts from user videos. Since then, AI excitement has touched every industry and entered the popular imagination.
Smartphone makers see a chance to cash in and are going to be touting the tech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the biggest mobile industry trade show in the world, which kicks off on Monday in Barcelona, Spain.
“Nobody wants to be seen as being behind the curve, and AI is just the talk of the town. It is the buzzword this year that all the vendors are going to be jumping on,” Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices research at IDC, told CNBC.
What is an AI phone?
The gear is harder to define, and it depends on which manufacturer you ask.
Analysts who spoke to CNBC broadly agree on a few things — that these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications, and that those AI apps will run on-device rather than in the cloud.
Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that enable the processing power required for AI applications.
But AI tech inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in devices for years and have allowed features such as background blur effects on smartphones and picture editing.
What is new is the introduction of large language models and generative AI. Large language models are huge AI models trained on vast amounts of data that underpin applications like the widely popular chatbots. These models unlock new features, such as the ability for chatbots to generate images or text from a user prompt.
“It is not just about having a chatbot, we have had these virtual assistants for a while. The difference is, it is generative now, so they can create a poem or summarize meetings. If it is about text to image creation, that was something that wasn’t done before,” Ma said.
The other big part of the AI smartphone puzzle is the term “on-device AI.” Previously, many AI applications on devices were actually partly processed in the cloud, then downloaded onto the phone. But advanced chips and the ability for large language models to effectively become smaller are likely to drive more AI applications to be run solely in the device, rather than in a data center.
“I think one of the big stories at MWC will be the ability of the AI models too run natively on the devices themselves and that is where it potentially starts to become a bit more of a gamechanger,” Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC.
Smartphone makers say on-device AI improves the security of gear, unlocks new applications and also makes them faster, since the processing is done on the handset.
This could unlock new applications that developers could create, both Ma and Wood said.
Eventually, Wood said, smartphone makers want to achieve “anticipatory computing” — the idea that AI “is smart enough to learn your behavior as a user and make the device so much more intuitive and predicting what you want to do next without you having to do much.”
But are AI phones a reality right now?
Sort of. AI has been used in devices for some time, but the new era of on-device AI with large language models is still in its early stages.
Device makers at MWC are going to show off lots of AI-powered features — and we are already seeing some of it. In January, Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S24 smartphone range, touting its AI capabilities. One feature that drew attention was the ability to circle an image or text you’re looking at on any app, then immediately search that on Google.
MWC will likely include demonstrations of AI features, from camera apps to chatbots on phones.
But the reality is that a lot of these perks are not actually on-device and still rely on processing in the cloud, according to IDC’s Ma. He added that, even with AI capabilities on devices, it will take a “number of years” before third-party developers figure out a “killer use case or that compelling use case that consumer can’t do without.”
Wood said the danger is that smartphone manufacturers talk a lot about AI, rather than about the experiences that the technology can deliver for users.
“Consumers have no idea what an AI smartphone is, they need the use cases to go round it,” Wood said. The risk is that there is “AI fatigue.”
Ultimately, the lofty AI experiences smartphone makers are dreaming of could be a long way out.
“We are building an unbelievable foundational platform for AI on device. 2024 will be the year we look back on and say that’s where it all started to happen but it could be a long time before we start of these benefit of that in terms of game changing experiences,” Wood said.
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.
The stock rose in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:
- Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
- Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected
Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.
The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.
Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.
“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.
Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.
However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.
WATCH: AI-led bull market set to continue, says Wells Fargo’s Ohsung Kwon
Technology
YouTube to allow creators banned for Covid-19, election misinformation to apply for reinstatement
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Google-owned YouTube on Tuesday said it will soon allow previously banned accounts to apply for reinstatement, rolling back a policy that had treated violations as permanent.
The change applies to channels removed for posting Covid-19 or election-related misinformation, according to a letter from Alphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. Previously, those types of offenses carried lifetime bans.
“Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding Covid and elections integrity,” Donovan wrote.
YouTube wrote on X that it will be a limited pilot project open to a subset of creators as well as channels that were terminated under policies the company has since retired. YouTube also said its new reinstatement program will launch soon.
Among channels previously banned under those rules were some associated with Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s not yet clear whether those channels will be reinstated.
This move follows mounting Republican pressure on tech companies to reverse Biden-era speech policies on vaccine and political misinformation. In March, Rep. Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, alleging YouTube was a “direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”
In 2021, YouTube said it would remove content that spread misinformation about all approved vaccines.
Donovan wrote that during the pandemic, senior Biden administration officials pressed the company to remove certain Covid-related videos that did not technically violate YouTube’s policies.
In the letter, Donovan said this pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
YouTube ended its stand-alone Covid misinformation rules in December 2024, according to Donovan’s letter.
YouTube “will not empower third-party fact-checkers” to moderate content and will continue to enable “free expression” on the platform, Donovan wrote. While Donovan writes that YouTube has not used fact-checkers, the platform has produced programs that are meant to label context on videos.
Similarly, Meta said in January that it had eliminated its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram.
YouTube has a feature that will display information panels with links to independent fact checks under videos. The feature says it provides more context on videos across YouTube with information from third-party sources.
In 2017, Google launched a fact-checking tool that would display labels on search and news results.
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