Samsung aims to take a stab directly at the heart of Google’s big AI ambitions with its upcoming phones. The next range of Samsung mobile devices coming next year will be bursting at the seams with generative AI, including a new assistant chatbot.
Samsung took the stage at its AI Forum hosted at its headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, to share a few scant details about its big mobile AI push. So, what’s the big AI? It’s essentially yet another ChatGPT-like virtual assistant that can summarize sentences, correct grammar, and respond to users with natural language, according to multiple reports from the event floor.
The Gauss bot should be able to compose emails and translate text. Samsung described additional assistant features that enable “smarter device control,” likely some kind of chatbot-enhanced voice or text controls. Not only that, but the new AI integration will add a code-generating bot as well as an AI image generator.
The bot takes its name from Carl Friedrich Gauss, an 18th and 19th-century German mathematician and physicist. Samsung called Gauss’ theory of normal distribution “the backbone of machine learning and AI.” Other than the historical callback, Samsung hasn’t revealed much—or really anything else—about the AI’s origins. In a release, the Korean tech giant said staff are already using the bot for “employee productivity,” but it did not share any more about the chatbot’s training data or anything about the large language model powering Gauss.
Gizmodo reached out to Samsung for additional information, but we did not immediately hear back.
There’s a strong likelihood we’ll see this new AI make its way onto Samsung’s flagship phones, specifically the Galaxy S24. That upcoming phone is trying to take a big bite out of Apple’s devices with a rumored ISOCELL zoom function and potentially ditching aluminum for a titanium frame.
Samsung has already offered some limited AI-based updates to its One UI 6 that help clean up users’ photos. The rumor mill has already been hammering on these supposed S24 AI features, helped along by Qualcomm’s AI-centric Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, which will supposedly power the new phone.
In its last quarterly earnings call last month, the VP of Samsung’s mobile business, Daniel Araujo, told investors that generative AI would make its way onto the company’s devices in 2024.
But the AI integration would directly compete with Google, which has been stretching itself thin trying to fit AI into every single one of its user-end products. The company’s Pixel 8 phone was the latest step in this endeavor, though users are still waiting to receive a chatbot-enhanced Google Assistant. This would essentially put the company’s Bard chatbot onto users’ phones and allow it access to users’ Gmail, Google Docs, and other apps to call up information on request.
And, of course, Samsung gave a passing wave to those concerned about the potential harms of AI. The company claimed it has an AI red team meant to monitor security and privacy issues “with the principles of AI ethics in mind.”
The question of AI harm has been a big reason why Google has kept its chatbot-enabled Google Search in beta, as it has occasionally proved itself hilariously wrong at best and dangerously misinformed at worst. Unlike Google, we haven’t seen Samsung test its chatbots in the light of day, so we may all get a front-row seat to how naughty Samsung’s AI is once it rears its head on the tech giant’s flagship devices next year.
