Baidu’s artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie is set to feature on Lenovo smartphones in the latest such deal by the Chinese technology giant.
Lenovo sells its own branded phones and also owns the phone brand Motorola. Ernie is already embedded in the browser and app store apps of Lenovo’s personal computers and tablets.
Meanwhile, Baidu is seeking practical applications for Ernie – its AI large language model (LLM) – and the company has, in recent weeks, entered similar deals with smartphone makers Samsung and Honor.
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Selling smartphones that offer generative AI features for services such as chatbots and real-time translation have become a new trend after a global craze for OpenAI’s ChatGPT popularised the technology in late 2022.
Google is seen to be a leader in AI smartphones with its Pixel phones and robust cloud-based AI while Apple has been reported to be working to bring generative AI models to the iPhone.
Research firm Canalys expects that 5% of smartphones shipped globally in 2024, or 60 million smartphones will be AI-capable.
AI services only from local firms in China
But AI services powered by US firms are unavailable in China, leaving the market to Chinese firms. The Chinese market has now over 200 AI models on offer, including from Baidu’s chief rivals Alibaba and Tencent.
Baidu CEO Robin Li said last November that firms now needed to focus on developing practical applications. China’s top phone brands including Vivo, Xiaomi and Huawei are also working on their own on-device AI models but have not disclosed details.
Such smartphone collaborations could not only help Baidu in this arena, but having its AI features deeply bundled with smartphones could also give the company exposure to a vast amount of data which could help Baidu’s LLM catch up to its US rivals.
“Adapting LLM on smartphones is the right moment to promote AI-powered features, although they may be limited now. In the long run, they may become a ‘must-have’,” Ivan Lam, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint, said.
- Reuters, with additional editing by Vishakha Saxena
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