Your Galaxy S23 might be powerful enough to quickly generate AI images

Fast AI image generation is now possible on an Android phone. In a recent demo video, Qualcomm was able to generate a 512 x 512-pixel image of a cat wearing armor using AI-image-generator Stable Diffusion version 1.5 on an Android phone. And the kicker is it finished in less than 14.42 seconds, making it pretty close to what PCs can do with the tech. 

To achieve this, company engineers used a process called “quantization”. Without getting too deep in the weeds here, they basically took the desktop version of Stable Diffusion, shrunk it down, and optimized it for mobile devices. According to Qualcomm, the process “increases performance [while] also [saving] power by allowing the model” to run more efficiently thereby “[consuming] less memory bandwidth.” 

It’s unknown exactly what mobile device was used in the demonstration. However, we do know it was powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 Mobile Platform, the exact same chipset found on the Samsung Galaxy S23. It is worth noting that other developers have managed to put Stable Diffusion on the Sony Xperia 5 II, but generating images on that phone took around an hour because of the weaker hardware. The main takeaway from Qualcomm’s achievement is its speed and what it could mean for users down the line.

Future of generative AI