Matisyahu's Blog

This year’s Google I/O 2024 was very AI centric but the focus of AI wasn’t about AI for AI sake but rather how integrating AI into popular Google products will improve the over all experience for end users. I remember speculating a while ago with the launch of the S24 that what we’ll end up seeing from Samsung is the use of AI on device but offer AI in the cloud for an enhanced experience – it would be free at the moment but sometime in 2025 there could be potentially a cost.

Google announced the Gemini Nano 1.5 which will result on on device processing then two tiers above that, processional and ultra, which are available in the cloud but there will be a price tag attached. I don’t think that Samsung would be doing their own cloud computing for AI but I could imagine Google offering a revenue sharing programme in much the same way that revenue is shared at the PlayStore between Google and OEMs as a way of encouraging OEMs to provide Android updates for customers long term. The reason why I speculate is because Google announced that Gemini Nano will run on Galaxy S24 and Pixel devices. When they do start charging for cloud based AI it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll integrate into enterprise AI offerings from Google.

Long term it’ll be interesting to see how dedicated hardware performs in terms of a cost per query (aka the amount of power required for each query the result cost of that power used) and whether, with dedicated hardware optimised for AI tasks, that Google is able to drive down the cost to the point that it becomes a standard feature as a point of differentiation. Maybe one option is to integrate Gemini Nano 1.5 in the cloud for consumers, maybe make available Gemini Pro the default for their business tier and higher with Ultra being a paid for upgrade – will be interesting to see.

It’s incredibly difficult to guess on what time scale any of this would occur given that I’ve speculated in the past that a given technology is years away then becomes omnipresent within a matter of a year. I was expecting 5G roll out in New Zealand would be something that there was no sense of urgency but within a matter of a year all the big carriers announce the shutting down of 2G and 3G networks within the next year or two not to mention the massive improvement in 5G coverage.

That is the problem with technology – it moves faster than most people expect. Will be interesting to see how the year progresses particularly with WWDC 2024 just around the corner and rumours of Microsoft working on its own large language model along with investing in a few AI startups to hedge their bets – the leader of today isn’t guaranteed to be the leader in the future.