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Nano, Google’s smallest AI model in its generative Gemini series, will no longer be available on Pixel 8 handsets as a consequence of “some hardware limitations.”
Announced in December, Nano runs on high-halt Android smartphones such as Google’s latest Pixel 8 Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy S24 line. The model affords various typical AI features of the day on these gadgets, such as summarizing audio recordings as text and Magic Originate, which can automatically generate snappily replies to text messages for you.
These capabilities will no longer be coming to the Pixel 8, though, which adore the Pro went on sale in October. In a panel discussion at some point of the latest episode of The Android Indicate, Terence Zhang, an engineer engaged on generative AI on Google Android, said this was down to “some hardware limitations.” (Skip to about 42:57 within the video beneath.)
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It is far not any longer clear what these limitations are exactly, pondering about each the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro gadgets are geared up with the same Google Tensor G3 processor and CPU and GPU cores. The Pixel 8 Pro, crucially, has more memory. The 8 has 8GB of RAM and the 8 Pro has 12GB, and by the sounds of it, that 8GB will cramp the performance of the model. So, no Nano for the Pixel 8.
Google declined to comment on the narrative.
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Reasonably competent large language models are typically memory and compute intensive, making them complicated to urge on smartphones, even ones with 8GB of DRAM.
Google developed AICore, an Android gadget service applications can exhaust to make Google Nano perform ML inference tasks, such as text generation, on the software the usage of whatever hardware acceleration is to hand.
Zhang said AICore is basically an API surface for Gemini Nano, and that this model is constrained by the computing energy of the software. On phones the place there is not any longer any such thing as a Nano, such as the Pixel 8, there is not any longer any such thing as a AICore to make exhaust of.
AICore is beneficial in that it allows apps to tap into Gemini Nano on the local software while not having an information superhighway connection to a few remote cloud service. All the text generated by the model is private for the reason that data doesn’t leave the smartphone, which also reduces latency, making it faster to urge. “Lastly, and most importantly, it is free,” Zhang said. Since all the workloads are urge the usage of the hardware on gadgets, it doesn’t payment a dime to interact with the model, in contrast to accessing an LLM from the cloud.
“AICore is at the moment most effective available on Google Pixel 8 Pro and Samsung S24 Assortment gadgets,” Google makes clear within the developer documentation.
The get giant is said to be planning to roll out more AI features for its declare-managed Assistant, powered by its larger Gemini Pro and Ultra models, subsequent year on its Pixel gadgets. ®
