This week, Qualcomm demonstrated potential future scenarios that its chips could enable with the assistance of large language models and generative AI.
In one example, Qualcomm showed how a car assistant could find a recipe for chicken enchiladas and add the ingredients to a shopping list. In another, the car computer uses Stable Diffusion, a type to create and send an AI-generated birthday card to the driver's brother. The demos were all running on the car's computer, not a phone. The assistant feature is a preview of how cars could become more like personal computers in the coming years. Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon sees cars as a "new computing platform," he wrote in a this week.
Qualcomm's demonstration highlights the company's desire to be seen as an AI company, through its low-power smartphone GPUs and AI accelerators. Investors have so far focused on Nvidia's cloud GPUs, which are used to power applications like ChatGPT. While the AI boom has tripled rival Nvidia's stock so far this year, Qualcomm is only up 5% during the same period.
A short-term goal for Qualcomm's language models is to create a smart user guide using a large language model that's been trained and fine-tuned on the dense user manuals that come with cars, said Nakul Duggal, automotive senior vice president at Qualcomm. Another frontier is driver monitoring, or using machine learning to determine if the driver is distracted or sleeping.
"We're working with automakers who are actively going from a flat manual that you have in your glove compartment, to really adding context where the car is going to be able to understand what is going on," Duggal said.
Another frontier for Qualcomm's platform could be features that can upgrade the car's software on the go with new self-driving capabilities, Duggal said — which could even be a new revenue stream for automakers.
"Where are you driving? Do you have trouble parking? Would you like to subscribe to that automated parking feature that we have that you haven't actually purchased, but we can upgrade over-the-air? Or would you like a free trial for a period of time?" Duggal said. "There are so many different things that you can do once you have context."
