Introducing the Gemini Nano AI: Elevating Smartphone Capabilities in Google’s New Pixel Model

UPDATE: 2024/03/28 10:23 EST BY CORBIN DAVENPORT

Gemini AI Is Coming to the Pixel 8 After All

Google confirmed to How-To Geek that Gemini Nano will roll out to the Pixel 8, backtracking on the previous stance that it wasn’t possible. It will be available as a developer preview in the next Pixel Feature Drop.

Google is all in with generative AI. After renaming its Bard chatbot as Gemini, the company has been pushing it quite heavily, in a similar manner to what Microsoft is currently doing with Copilot. While Gemini hasn’t taken over regular Google Search, it can replace the Google Assistant on your phone. Google has also been working on a more basic on-device version, but it won’t be coming to the non-Pro version of the Pixel 8.

Google has confirmed that the regular Pixel 8 is not compatible with Gemini Nano. Gemini Nano is a smaller version of the Gemini large language model that is efficient enough to run locally on a smartphone or tablet, without the need to offload processing to external servers or maintain an Internet connection. Google’s Terence Zhang said in a podcast that the smaller of the two Pixel 8 models won’t get Gemini Nano “because of some hardware limitations.” Gemini Nano is currently available on the Pixel 8 Pro and the Galaxy S24 series, and it will come to more high-end devices down the road as well.

The part that is catching our eye about this is the fact that there are “hardware limitations” that keep the regular Pixel 8 from being compatible with Gemini Nano. As far as we know, both the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro are almost identical hardware-wise. Both run Google’s Tensor G3 SoC, which feature Google’s newest TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) precisely for on-device AI applications. You could say that the whole selling point of Tensor chips, in fact, is Google’s AI magic.

The Pixel 8 Pro does have 12GB of RAM against the Pixel 8’s 8GB, but as Mishaal Rahman points out , the Galaxy S24 series starts at 8GB of RAM and is officially compatible with the on-device Gemini Nano AI. Unless there’s a difference between the Tensor G3 in the Pixel 8 versus the Tensor G3 in the Pixel 8 Pro, we don’t really know how else to explain this. If you want to run on-device AI, you should probably spring for the Pixel 8 Pro instead.

Source: Thurrott

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