Following the news that MediaTek is working closely with Meta to build a complete edge computing ecosystem designed to accelerate AI application development on smartphones:

Anisha Bhatia, Senior Technology Analyst at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, comments:

“Meta and MediaTek’s on-device AI partnership aims to take generative AI mainstream – to smartphones, vehicles, smart home and other IoT devices. This is Meta’s second partnership in a month – it also made a July 2023 announcement with chip giant Qualcomm – with both showing the vital strategic position of gen AI in Meta’s path ahead.

“MediaTek is bringing generative AI to what it does best – chipsets for personal devices – and bringing Meta’s Llama 2-based AI Large Language Models (LLM) to its processors for on-device AI. Meta’s Llama 2 model has an advantage over rival GPT-4: Llama 2 can be packaged into a smaller program, which means it can run on smaller, lighter devices – such as smartphones. This will split the heavy weight of data between cloud and device, making it easier to access AI, as well as making AI cheaper, more personalized, and private. If Meta can associate itself with a tech that encourages data privacy, the company may begin to restore its tattered reputation around it.

“But LLMs are early tech yet, and notoriously erratic, with new abilities emerging and disappearing and reappearing later ‘at will’ as the models get bigger. This erraticism puts a company’s reputation and image at risk. But even though this segment is experimental in nature, investor interest in gen AI remains high.”