1y ago

Google says the AI-focused Pixel 8 can’t run its latest smartphone AI models

arstechnica.com

Gemini Nano can't run on the smaller Pixel 8 due to mysterious "hardware limitations."

15 comments

Can someone explain why AI on your phone is so revolutionary and desirable?
- Access. If it can truly run fully locally, then companies can have their LLM model in everyone's pockets, basically.
  As far desirable, it depends on the person. And it's more about what people don't want, then want. Google has been promising various AI features that people will be able to run on the device, but so far most of them send the data to Google servers and then return the result.
- Less compute overhead on them giant and expensive datacentres as well as the ability to work offline.
  
  That explains why Google wants it, but what do phone owners get? What is being offered of value. I keep hearing all this talk about this wave of AI on phones, but don't see what it's providing.
- Gpt4all already lets you do this. You need to have at leave 8gb of unused memory to run it and it can be a bit slow, but it works well for the most part.
  This way you can use gpt without sharing your data online and it will work without internet access as well.
  The ones you run locally can be uncensored meaning, it will not avoid certain subjects that google and open ai deem not good to talk about.
  
  Interesting. I'm just paranoid when the super brain has been programmed by a corporation "to help you." Corporations are self serving, that's just business.
- One thing that is important to me is the on-device subtitles. Pixel phones can caption any audio played on the device. That includes music, movies, random internet videos, phone calls, video calls, anything. For someone with hearing issues, this is a huge benefit. I'm not aware of any other phone that can do this.
I mean, that's what you get for buying the cheaper phone! Except I got the 7 Pro, and it feels like it was abandoned as soon as the 8 was announced. As soon as I read that I wasn't getting functionality that was clearly cloud functionality, I realized that Google stopped giving 2 shits about existing users that don't immediately upgrade to the latest phone. Also it sucked at making phone calls, so that was the last Pixel phone for me.
- They claim that you get years worth of support, but apparently that's just a lie.
Personally, I've tried using Gemini for a couple weeks now and last night decided to disable it. It can't even manage commands like "play music" to open Spotify, or start calls and texts without being unlocked. The whole point of a hands free assistant for me is to be hands free... I use it in my car for calls and texts, literally the primary reason to have a cell phone. Who gives a crap about "creative inspiration" if they're not even prioritizing the basic features of a phone?
- Yeah, it's shit. It won't work with the phone locked for the most part. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. You can't change the voice. It can't set stuff on the phone. Half the time it can't even answer basic questions that the regular assistant has no issues with. Idk why they'd release this to the public when it's clearly a beta product, if that.

15 comments