At Counterpoint’s AI 360 Summit, held in Silicon Valley recently, Peter Richardson, Vice President of Research at Counterpoint, sat down with James Chen, Vice President of Product Technology Marketing at MediaTek, to discuss the critical applications of AI, particularly in edge devices. Key topics covered included AI in smartphones, automotive and smart homes, agentic framework, future of AI and more.

The Interview

Key takeaways from the discussion

Critical applications of AI in edge devices

• Smartphones: End-user applications like using generative AI for on-device processing and inferencing, thus cutting reliance on the cloud.

• Automobiles: MediaTek has announced a partnership with NVIDIA to enable AI experiences driving advanced safety features, improved infotainment, contextual road awareness and enhanced AI assistant.

• GenAI in smart home devices: Intelligent AI assistant to monitor your home, detect anomalies and improve safety.

Agentic framework for applications across domains

• Seamless AI experiences across devices: The cloud will be the central knowledge hub to ensure a seamless AI experience as users transition across devices, from smartphones to smartwatches to smart homes to automobiles.

• Agentic framework: There will be AI agents across different devices and apps, working behind the scenes to manage, plan and coordinate to serve the user’s requests.

• Intent-based UIs: This will enable users to interact with AI with natural language commands, so the agentic AI understands the intent with contextual awareness to complete the task.

Future of AI apps

• Decoupling models from apps: There are small and large language models, and multi-modality as well. But these models and apps don’t need one-to-one pairing. In the future, the ecosystem may allow dynamic pairing of apps with best-suited models.

• Applications beyond auto and smartphone: GenAI’s scope will expand to more domains, smart home being one of them.

• Scalability and adaptability: To handle these evolving apps in the future, scalable frameworks and chips will be essential.

Analyst takeaways

• MediaTek's James Chen talks about how AI will impact the smartphone, smart home and automotive sectors, among many others.

• Agents will be able to perform tasks on behalf of users, making choices and taking actions within prescribed limits.

• AI models will be seamlessly selected to carry out specific actions. This will likely be transparent to the user – things will just work.

• This will be a profound shift from today’s app-centric world.