Qualcomm president and CEO Cristiano Amon said in an interview with Sources that several companies at the forefront of AI are asking Qualcomm to support smartphones that run at least a 100-billion-parameter language model locally and continuously by 2028, adding that "AI companies are starting to do phones." He did not name those companies, and Qualcomm has not published a complete hardware plan or commercial phone roadmap for reaching that goal. The report notes a 4-bit quantized 100B model would need roughly 50GB of memory for its weights alone, before room for the OS, apps and context cache, while flagship phones typically offer 12GB to 16GB and DRAM supply is tight and expensive. Possible workarounds include more aggressive quantization, MoE expert offloading or keeping weights in flash storage loaded on demand, each with quality or speed trade-offs; Amon said a more realistic near-term step is distilled 20B-to-30B models, with thermals and battery life still limiting always-on operation.

Qualcomm·Cristiano Amon·Snapdragon·+4