I’m really curious about how AI works on our smartphones. Like, when I use features like face unlock, voice assistants, or those AI camera modes - what’s actually happening behind the scenes? Is it all happening on my phone or in the cloud? I’m not looking for super technical details, just want to understand the basics of how these AI features work on mobile devices. Any explanations would be appreciated!
Let’s start with saying that the so called AI is not “intelligence”. It’s just a pretty advanced algorithm doing some “magic”. Behind the scenes it’s just a regular linear algebra equations dealing with bazillions of rows and columns feeded from the huge matrix. Modern mobile devices are capable of running “AI” models locally but it would cost a lot of power which would make a phone as unusable as Apple watch (aka charge it few times a day). So, the easy tasks like face id are done locally, more complex one (voice assistants) are outsourced to the cloud.