A Chinese institution you whitethorn person ne'er heard of has conscionable announced that it's making a smartphone - oregon astatine slightest sourcing 1 from an ODM. But wait, this is nary regular smartphone; it's the world's archetypal AI agentic phone. And conjecture what, it's being hyped earlier OpenAI got a chance to hype up its ain rumored smartphone.
The institution successful question is called StepFun - it was founded successful 2023 by erstwhile Microsoft employees successful Shanghai, and the telephone they are teasing contiguous is called the StepX Neo. StepFun is nary alien to on-device AI, but they've truthful acold provided work integrations to manufacturers similar Oppo and Geely.
We're not definite if the StepX fittingness level is related to this task successful immoderate way, but if it's not, past it's rather comic however StepFun couldn't adjacent beryllium bothered to Google the sanction it wants to use. Or possibly it wanted it to lucifer SpaceX truthful overmuch that it didn't attraction astir the information that there's an wholly antithetic happening retired determination that's besides called StepX.
The telephone runs Step AOS and has the "personal intelligent agent" Step Amoo connected board. Amoo is the happening you speech to, and it's akin to immoderate different AI chatbot - you speech to it successful earthy language. The OS allegedly creates a "native runtime environment" for "intelligent agents", focusing connected "the 3 large bottlenecks of AI agents: memory, decision-making, and execution". Memory retrieval by the cause is said to instrumentality "as small as" 15ms. The cause is allegedly excelling successful offline autonomous execution capabilities too.
The AI operations connected committee aren't wholly on-device, though; they besides person entree to the unreality for analyzable tasks portion making definite nary idiosyncratic information leaves the phone.
The company's on-device LLM is called Step Edge, and it claims this ranks archetypal among akin models successful 29 authoritative benchmarks, but hasn't said which benchmarks those are and which models it's comparing to.
At this point, it's not wide if Step AOS is really thing much than a tegument connected apical of Android - we uncertainty it, but we don't cognize yet. StepFun says it's a operation of Android, Linux, and RTOS, but that doesn't springiness america overmuch to spell on.
The telephone has a dot matrix LED show connected the backmost that's reminiscent of Nothing phones, and truthful far, perfectly zero specs person been revealed.
StepFun has, however, announced the archetypal batch of partners for the device, which see a batch of Chinese apps and services similar Meituan, Alipay, Amap, Baidu, Didi, Ctrip, and more. And that's each we cognize truthful acold astir this hype gathering "announcement" that was mostly buzzwords with small substance.
Maybe this volition crook into an existent merchandise 1 day; possibly it volition adjacent beryllium awesome for an "agentic phone", immoderate that means. But for now, it seems similar a smaller Chinese AI institution trying desperately to get immoderate attraction distant from the large players, and to assertion it was the archetypal successful the satellite to "launch" a smartphone, adjacent though it did nary specified thing. Not yet, anyway.
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