Qualcomm Wants Its AI Chips On Every Device

Jason Howell (0:00)

Coming up on AI.

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Jason Howell (0:42)

Hey Inside, I'm Jason Howell, not in Maui with Jeff Jarvis. I'm a little disappointed that I don't get to spend some Maui time with Jeff, but I am not disappointed to be in Maui thanks to the folks at Qualcomm for flying me out for Snapdragon Summit. I'm going to talk all about the Summit. I have an interview, an actually really special interview with VP and GM of Google Book, John Solomon from Google, and a whole roundup of lots of news, including all the stuff happening at Meta Connect. That's up next.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to AI Inside, the show where we take a look at the AI that is layered throughout the world of technology. I am your host today, Jason Howell, just me, no Jeff Jarvis. I'm missing Jeff out here. I think it would be really fun to get a drink by the ocean. With Jeff someday, maybe next year, who knows. I am in Maui, Hawaii, because of Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit. Qualcomm reached out to me. They invited me out. They said, we'll take care of your travel if you want to come out and check out the event in Hawaii, and it's been really fantastic. First and foremost, thank you to Qualcomm for sponsoring this visit to Maui for the event. I'm always catching the event, third person, and I felt like it's a really cool opportunity for me to get a little bit more comfortable with the chips side of things. Because computer chips, I wouldn't necessarily say are my bread and butter at all. At the same time, Snapdragon and the things that Qualcomm has been doing over the years, is really very pertinent A to a lot of my other podcast history with Android Faithful and all about Android and all the Android stuff. I've often said that Qualcomm is like a secret, not a secret, a special character when it comes to Android. It's almost like they are one of the bosses, the boss level of Android.

Getting to know them on a deeper level and the technology on a deeper level, and we're always talking about how that's interplaying with the smartphones that we're using, is really important to me. But beyond that, we are, and more pertinent to this show, we are in a real inflection point with technology, and there's just so much happening in artificial intelligence, and Qualcomm's announcements this year have been so ingrained and intertwined with artificial intelligence, with agentic AI, on-device artificial intelligence, and we're going to talk about it all. So I want to start this first block of the show, just kind of giving you a sense of some of my highlights from the show. I've now been here a couple of days, I've been to Keynotes both days, I've been through the demo area and checked out a bunch of the technology that's on display there. And I would have to say that the real theme this year, and actually Qualcomm CEO, Cristiano Amman called this out from a stage, calling it Snapdragon anyways, the processor for the agentic age, lots of references to the AI smartphone and what that means in 2026, like what is an AI smartphone? And I think really at the end of the day, it's just that we're so used to using these smartphones in our pockets as these devices that we go to to do things. We pull it out because we have a thing we want to do and we do it. And what Qualcomm has been pointing out here is that there's a real shift happening right now from phone-centric AI, which is not to say that the phone goes away, but this intentional use of the phone to do certain things for ourselves, something we've done for decades at this point, to an agentic-centric model. We're still early there, but I think what they're envisioning, and a lot of what they're talking about is this idea that the smartphone and the chip that's inside of the smartphone, yes, has to be capable and able to do all the things that we are very intentional about when we use the smartphone, but to also do these things for us in the background, when the phone isn't being used, that requires a lot out of our smartphone. It also requires a lot of these agentic systems for them to be accurate and on point and to know us really well, have the right amount of context and all that kind of stuff that the agentic AI can draw from. And it's not just about smartphones either, it's about all of the hardware, right? So that if I'm using a smartphone and it knows all these things about me and it's using a Snapdragon chip to kind of put those pieces together, that I'm going to get a similar experience out of other devices that I use using Snapdragon hardware but also those same models that I'm going to be known, that my personal context is going to be easily shared between all these devices in the hopes that maybe someday in the future, there's low kind of friction in these devices, just kind of knowing who we are, what we're looking for. And I think the everlasting promise is that they know what we want before we know it. I continue to be skeptical on that front, but if there's a technology that's going to get us closer to that, I think where we're at, where we're driving towards with artificial intelligence certainly takes us there, takes us closer.