To Accelerate Its AI Vision, Qualcomm Forms AI Research Organization

In case the fact has somehow escaped you, artificial intelligence is big business right now. We went from barely hearing about AI in the real-world to hearing about it all of the time. It’s hardly annoying, though, like many other constant reminders in our lives can be (it’s “Laurel”, by the way). It doesn’t matter whether it’s a vendor producing mobile CPUs, or enterprise-scale GPUs – everyone wants a part of the AI pie. Ultimately, that’s important, because competition and progress is good.

At an event specific to AI held in Beijing, Qualcomm took the veil off of its latest efforts that are anything but artificial. With its brand-new AI Research branch, Qualcomm will be tackling AI from numerous angles, with the main goal being that the best AI is made possible on its platforms – both from a performance and feature standpoint.

Qualcomm doesn’t have the steepest uphill battle here, because even Arm, the company behind the Snapdragon CPU cores, has emphasized the AI prowess its architecture benefits from. AI can be greatly accelerated on special hardware, but it doesn’t explicitly need it. Often, our current SoCs are fast enough to deliver quality performance, and that will only continue to get better.

To Qualcomm, AI means many different things. To us regular consumers, it’s hard to envision anything other than talking to our phone’s digital assistant – that’s one aspect of how AI has already affected our lives, even if the mechanic appears easy. That’s the beauty of AI – it can be used to enhance our lives, whether that’s to find cures, or the name of that statue you’re standing in front of.

Qualcomm’s Jim Thompson says that his company’s goal is to “make on-device AI ubiquitous”, and that ties into an earlier announcement of the company’s Snapdragon 710 platform. AI by its nature is extremely computationally intensive, so the faster and more feature-rich the chips in our pockets, the faster we’ll get cooler AI capabilities on-the-go. Today, AI may seem simple in the grand scheme, but the more time that passes, the more we’ll rely on it for many different aspects of our lives. Even if we don’t immediately realize it.