Advancing Android Intelligence with Qualcomm’s Integration of Stable Diffusion Technology

Much of the excitement around AI has transitioned to chatbots, but image generation with tools like Stable Diffusion remains popular. Stable Diffusion has now been demonstrated to run on an Android phone, without the need for external servers.

Qualcomm has shown off a few images that were generated by Stable Diffusion locally on an Android phone. While you were able to look up an image generation tool, put a prompt, and have it generated on the cloud, these are generated completely locally, using Qualcomm’s AI Stack and, of course, the hardware in your smartphone.

It can be easy to forget since we don’t really notice its uses, but many smartphones these days are coming with dedicated AI acceleration hardware. Qualcomm says that it’s using the AI Engine that comes with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC to achieve these results. Just type a prompt, and Stable Diffusion will generate an image for you attempting to closely match that prompt.

Qualcomm said in a blog post, “we used the Qualcomm AI Engine direct framework to map the neural network into a program that efficiently runs on our target hardware. […] The result of this full-stack optimization is running Stable Diffusion on a smartphone under 15 seconds for 20 inference steps to generate a 512x512 pixel image — this is the fastest inference on a smartphone and comparable to cloud latency.”

You can’t use Stable Diffusion on your Android phone locally just yet — this is just a technical demonstration. It could eventually turn into a publicly-available app, but Qualcomm isn’t promising anything just yet.

Source: Qualcomm

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