AI companies ask for phones that run 100B-parameter models all the time by 2028
Partly confirmed
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 12 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra161 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5100 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash191 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7130 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 100 days before it.
Key facts
- Request from AI companies, as summarised by Sources: support for at least 100-billion-parameter models on phones by 2028, running continuously. For scale: Qualcomm’s September 2026 flagship chip runs a 30B-parameter mixture-of-experts model locally
- Techmeme’s headline (Oct 12) adds that Amon said AI companies are ‘starting to do phones’; that wording is not on the episode page we read
- Amon expects an upgrade ‘supercycle’ from agents that use apps, know personal context and act for the user; buyers have delayed upgrades because of high memory prices
- On devices beyond phones and glasses: ‘It feels like an iPod moment.’ He is most bullish on smart glasses; camera earbuds, jewelry, pendants and badges are in testing, some with Qualcomm technology
- Qualcomm chips will power coming devices from ‘AI companies like OpenAI’ (Sources); they already power Meta’s smart glasses
- Data centers: ‘Our DNA is building chips, assuming there’s a battery on the other side.’ Qualcomm bought Modular (Chris Lattner’s AI-software startup; all-stock deal of about $3.92B announced June 24, 2026, per Quartz and Reuters figures) to offer an alternative to Nvidia’s software, and Amon said it will ‘celebrate every single Modular deployment on Nvidia’
- 6G: demos expected at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, early deployments around 2029–2030; he described glasses and other devices as ‘walking cameras on this world’ feeding context to AI
What happened
Alex Heath interviewed Cristiano Amon live at Snapdragon Summit. The episode page says AI companies are asking Qualcomm for phone chips that can run models of at least 100 billion parameters by 2028, with AI active all the time. Amon also talked about AI wearables, Qualcomm’s move into data-center chips after buying Modular, and 6G.
Why it matters
It is a chip supplier’s view of what AI labs plan for consumer devices: models several times larger than today’s on-device ones, running continuously on the phone. The claim comes from one interview and is not confirmed by any lab.
Sources
5 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
5 sources: 2 press, 3 reactions
Press
- Sources (Alex Heath): Qualcomm’s CEO on the coming AI phone supercycle (Oct 8, 2026)sources.news, press
- Quartz: Qualcomm acquires Modular in an all-stock deal (June 24, 2026)qz.com, press
Reactions
Changes
- Filed (Techmeme, Oct 12). Written from the episode page (highlights and description), not a full transcript