AI companies are "starting to do phones," Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon says, and they are already asking his company to build chips that can run 100-billion-parameter AI models directly on the device, continuously, by 2028. Amon made the comments in an interview with Alex Heath for the Sources podcast, recorded live at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii.
The claim matters because Qualcomm supplies the chips inside most Android phones, Meta's smart glasses and upcoming devices from AI companies, including OpenAI. If AI firms are designing their own hardware around on-device models, the phone's role is changing from an app launcher into a device that runs AI agents locally, all the time.
What Qualcomm's CEO says about AI phones
Amon expects AI agents that open your apps, understand your personal context and act on your behalf to trigger a new smartphone supercycle. He compares the moment to the early iPhone, when the apps that would define the platform had not been invented yet. "The smartphone was defined by the third-party applications," he says, and he expects agents to reshape the phone experience in a similar way.
According to Amon, AI companies are already asking Qualcomm to support at least 100-billion-parameter models on phones by 2028, with AI running all the time. A 100B-parameter model is far larger than the on-device AI models shipping in phones today, which shows how quickly the industry expects local AI processing to scale.
- AI companies are "starting to do phones," per Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon
- They are asking Qualcomm to support 100B-parameter models on phones by 2028
- The AI would run continuously, not only when an app is open
