Qualcomm CEO says AI companies want 100B-parameter models running on phones by 2028
Qualcomm chief executive Cristiano Amon says AI companies have asked his company to make phones capable of running at least a 100-billion-parameter model by 2028, with the model active almost continuously. Amon made the remarks on Alex Heath’s Sources podcast, recorded live at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Maui, though he declined to name the companies behind the request. He said they want a model “running kind of all the time”, according to a transcription by The Next Web.
Some of the companies at the forefront of AI are telling Qualcomm, ‘By 2028, I need to make sure that I have the ability to run at least a hundred billion parameter model into a phone.’
AI companies are also starting to build their own handsets, Amon said, naming ByteDance’s Doubao phone, manufactured by Nubia, as an example from China and adding that more are coming. Heath pointed out that personal agents such as Muse and Grok Bot drive browsers on virtual machines in the cloud rather than on the phone. Amon answered that some of that work will stay in data centers while some of it has to happen on the device.
Humans are not going to go travel to a data center, ring the bell and say, ‘Give me some AI.’
Amon likened the moment to the early iPhone, when the applications that later defined the platform did not yet exist. He said “The smartphone was defined by the third-party applications,” and he expects agents to play that role on the next generation of phones. The launch of OpenClaw made the idea of an AI-first smartphone concrete for him, he said, describing an agent that plans, routes tasks and acts on the user’s behalf.
Qualcomm’s current flagship silicon sits below that 2028 target. The company announced the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6 at the same summit, and Computerbase reports that the Extreme variant gets 50 percent more dedicated NPU memory, which Qualcomm says prepares it for mixture-of-experts models, where only part of the model is active per token — the example given is a 30-billion-parameter model with roughly 3 billion active. The interview does not say how much memory or storage a 100-billion-parameter model would need on a phone.
Memory prices have risen five to six times, Amon said, and the smartphone market is down 20% this year as a result. He said buyers are putting off upgrades rather than losing interest, saying “It’s not a demand problem” and pointing to pent-up demand. Amon put annual phone sales at about 1.2 billion units and said the market remains smaller than it was in 2019.