30 minutes. Samsung immediately spent this much time highlighting the arrival of Galaxy AI. Bringing together new options on the Galaxy S24/S24+ and Galaxy S24 Ultra, the platform became the absolute centerpiece of the event and showed: Artificial intelligence will be the big argument From many manufacturers to increase sales of their smartphones.

Interesting features were certainly seen at the Samsung event: real-time translation and transcription are promising, and it joins the already well-known generative photo editing we saw in the Google Pixel’s Magic Editor.

Probably the most surprising feature was the “Circle to Find”; this was the new way of finding information about anything in an image by simply drawing a circle on the screen. Some of the functions shown were exclusive to Samsung, but others, such as Circle to search, will reach many Android phones in the future.

Here’s what we learned next Galaxy AI’s exclusive features will not be free. They will do this by the end of 2025, but from then on they will have to pay for it. There are no details on how much these options will cost, but a footnote on the product page includes the following information:

Artificial Intelligence functions will be free on Samsung Galaxy devices until the end of 2025. The availability of AI features provided by third parties is subject to change and in each case is subject to the terms and conditions of the provider.

Smartphone manufacturers want to copy car manufacturers

Will users be willing to pay extra for these features? They might be, if they really take advantage of these features, but it opens the door to a troubling future. An application where you will not only have to pay for your mobile phone, but also subscribe to certain manufacturer services to enjoy all its features.

This possibility is worrying and reminds us of a recent case where the game didn’t go so well. This is what happened in the automobile industry. BMW launched a controversial subscription to enable heated seats, for example, but had to backtrack. This market has become ridiculous, especially considering that you have to pay extra to unlock the maximum rotation speed of the wheels.

However, subscriptions to extra functions in the automotive world may also become common, especially in an attempt to offer driver assistance options.

Tesla continues to charge a fortune for its driving assistance system (the misnamed “Full Autonomous Driving”, FSD), and so does General Motors, which requires you to pay $2,200 per start and then $25 for Super Cruise, its self-driving function on highways. moon. Ford has the same thing, they call it BluCruise and it costs $75 a month.

These options are everywhere and are one of manufacturers’ best hopes for increasing revenue. General Motors, mentioned above, is responsible for these subscriptions. Allow 25,000 million per year in 2030. Do you know how much Netflix will earn in 2023? $32,740 million.

Artificial intelligence will not come cheap (by any means)

These figures are quite interesting, and it makes sense to think that mobile manufacturers are considering doing something similar. Artificial intelligence features may give them an excuse for this, but there is an important point to consider here: whether these functions are executed locally.

The rise of generative AI models has been spectacular in 2023, and this success has led to the emergence of countless AI services in the cloud. They summarize documents for us, transcribe meetings, allow us to design beautiful images, provide us with virtual friends or help us plan trips. Some of these services offer limited and free versions, but in almost all cases the same thing happens: If you want to use them 100%, you have to pay.

This is what many people are taking advantage of to expand the subscription model in such services. OpenAI did it with ChatGPT Plus, and Microsoft did it in a big way with the avalanche of rollouts of AI-based solutions. These include Microsoft 365 Copilot or the recently released Copilot Pro, and all these launches show that taking advantage of artificial intelligence does not come cheap.

However, as we said, all of the services we have mentioned have been running on the cloud until now. Being able to use them requires a lot of computing power and a lot of energy, as well as developing the models, so it makes sense for users to pay for them.

Things are changing with functions like Samsung’s proposed because most of them use Gemini Nano, an artificial intelligence model developed by Google. Runs completely locally without a cloud connection. The models are more limited and modest than those found in the cloud, but they still only require our mobile phone, so will they really make us pay for something like this?

While this doesn’t seem to make much sense and everything needs to be clarified and confirmed, it seems reasonable to think that only advanced functions that need to be connected to the cloud require a monthly subscription. In fact, this is what happens today: you can use Midjourney or ChatGPT Plus from your mobile phone without any problems, but you will have to pay for these services.

This leads us to think that Samsung and other manufacturers are offering integration of natively running AI services (either their own or Google’s, as in “Search Circle”), but perhaps also offering their own offerings. go further and allow access to AI services in the cloud especially for use on mobile phones and to which we can subscribe. An example of this would be the real-time call translation function, which is (for now) exclusive to Samsung and could justify users paying extra to take advantage of it.

What seems clear is that artificial intelligence is exactly what manufacturers need to increase the price of mobile phones in 2024. And if everything follows the route subscriptions have taken in the automotive world, this is just the beginning.

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