September 18, 2017 - 13:59 AMT
Huawei to unveil the “real AI phone” on October 16

Huawei has announced that it’s going to unveil the “real AI phone” on October 16, with the launch of its latest flagship, the Mate 10, The Verge says.

Putting dedicated AI chips in mobile devices allows for faster processing, longer battery life, and greater user security. And last month at IFA, Huawei unveiled its latest system-on-chip: the Kirin 970, which comes with its own “Neural Processing Unit” or NPU.

Like Apple’s neural engine, the NPU is a set of processing cores within the phone’s chipset that are dedicated to running AI tasks. But it’s possible Huawei’s AI integration can go deeper. With its previous flagship, the Mate 9, it used machine learning to adapt the device’s operating system to users’ habits, allocating processing power and memory to the most-used tasks.

Whether or not this works as advertised is difficult to say (the benefits are only supposed to become clear after months of use) but it does show Huawei’s ambition to leverage artificial intelligence on a system-wide level.