In Depth: How the AI Race Has Spread From the Cloud to the Palm of Your Hand

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Unlike cloud-based AI, which relies on data centers to process resource-intensive tasks, edge AI is adept at making real-time decisions without the internet and can be applied to smart devices in everyday use.

“Find a photo of a girl laughing while wearing a garbage bag in the rain.”

When Xie Weiqin, AI solution director at Chinese smartphone-maker Vivo, typed this sentence into a phone at the Vivo Developer Conference on Nov. 1, the photo of the girl appeared almost instantly on the phone’s screen.

Xie was demonstrating the smartphone assistant powered by Vivo’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) model. In addition to searching photos and files, the model can assist users in editing photos, extracting key points from papers, and generating social media threads based on keywords or images. These new smartphone functions are enabled by the so-called edge AI technology.