Rong Guoqiang is currently the general manager of the Shanghai Humanoid Robot Innovation Incubator. Previously, he served as the president of Huawei Terminal Cloud, the deputy general manager of Huawei Honor Business Unit, the vice chairman of Ping An Technology, and the chief technology officer of China Pacific Insurance.
More than a decade ago, he personally participated in and led a technical project at Huawei called "calling applications of applications," which resulted in the creation of the first-generation Honor Magic, an AI phone widely recognized by the outside world.
With major mobile phone manufacturers and large model manufacturers launching or planning to launch AI phones, Rong Guoqiang's experience makes him an excellent candidate to explain "what exactly is an AI phone and whether an iPhone killer is coming soon?"
Lately, I've often been asked by friends how they evaluate the combination of large-scale models with major domestic and international mobile phone manufacturers such as Apple and Huawei, as well as the AI phones that OpenAI, Doubao, Jieyue Xingchen, and even DeepSeek may plan to launch.
Everyone was very curious.Is an iPhone killer on the horizon? What opportunities will the emergence of AI smartphones bring to the development of the AI industry both domestically and internationally? Against the backdrop of a global tech war, where do domestic industries have a chance to win this race?
More than a decade ago, I personally participated in a technology and product trial directly planned and led by senior leaders of Huawei. Almost at the same time that Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, and others on the other side of the ocean were exploring and ushering in the golden age of artificial intelligence, China's technology leaders had already begun exploring the industrialization of artificial intelligence based on their own business strategies.
Huawei's initial motivation for embarking on this technological exploration was to find its strategic positioning for the future after the mobile internet era. The ultimate result of this exploration was the launch of the first-generation Honor Magic at the end of 2016, which was widely recognized at the time as the world's first AI phone.
I have no intention of advocating for Huawei or arguing about who had the world's first AI phone. The important thing is to look back at the origins of that technological exploration more than a decade ago, and the birth of the Magic Phone, to revisit its thought process and procedures, and to discuss its successes and lessons learned.This can provide a reference for the development of the current domestic AI industry, especially for smart devices represented by smartphones, as well as related industries such as robotics.
Starting point: The concept of "application calling application"
In late 2010, at the Shanghai World Expo's Ship Pavilion, Xu Zhijun, then Vice Chairman of Huawei and Rotating Chairman of the EMT, and I had a discussion.With the rapid development of the mobile internet and the emergence of various apps, what will the future of mobile phones look like?
Back then, there weren't as many apps as there are today, and enthusiasts were used to downloading apps from third-party app stores like Wandoujia. Also, the storage and chip capabilities of mobile phones at that time were far less advanced than they are today.
However, Huawei's top management has already keenly and clearly predicted a scenario:As user-facing apps become more widespread, user behavior will be increasingly digitized, making it possible for networks and devices to record and understand user behavior.
As users use more diverse and frequent applications, the granularity of user behavior data becomes finer, leading to increasingly higher accuracy in this analysis. Data networks and various hardware devices are becoming increasingly adept at understanding users, making better ways for devices to interact with users possible.
The conclusion of the discussion at the World Expo was that: in the future, standardized software will be replaced by irregular software; and future mobile phones will transcend the stage of smartphones and become intelligent phones.
Xu Zhijun immediately decided to develop this intelligent system and create a "smartphone." Later, he further summarized this idea and logic.He believes that in the era of mobile internet, the core essence of smartphones is "using applications to call other applications".
I also joined Huawei and began to lead and participate in this technical project that explores the ability to "call applications of applications". The name of this technical project has a strong historical background, and it is called iMax.
This was the strategic starting point for the world's first AI phone. However, in 2010 and for a long time afterward, Huawei executives and I were not used to using the term "AI phone," and instead used another term, "intelligent phone," to describe the upcoming AI phone.
This project was never about making a better phone from the beginning, but about exploring a completely new strategic path after the smartphone era, represented by the mobile internet.There will be a smarter, more intelligent system that understands users better, which will call upon various service capabilities to proactively provide services to users.
In December 2016, Huawei's Honor brand officially launched the Honor Magic, equipped with a smart system called Magic Live. It supports scene awareness and more intelligent interaction. While fully protecting user privacy and data security, it can continuously learn and understand user habits and connect different apps to proactively serve users.
Standing on the stage, Honor CEO Zhao Ming used the term "Intelligent Phone" for the first time in public. A year later at the CES exhibition in the United States, Huawei Consumer Business CEO Yu Chengdong also began to use the term.
The technological exploration behind the first AI Phone
I often get curious friends asking me why Huawei was able to make an AI phone more than a decade ago, with a mix of curiosity and skepticism.
It was no coincidence. In 2012, Hinton and Sutskever's convolutional neural network won the ImageNet competition, and the deep learning boom was about to begin.
At that time, there was also a surge of interest in deep learning in China's academic and industrial circles.In particular, research institutions both domestically and internationally, such as NEC Research Institute in Japan, have cultivated a group of Chinese AI scientists. Later, they joined companies like Baidu and ByteDance, or founded their own AI companies, continuing their research in areas such as recommendation systems, facial recognition, and autonomous driving.
Huawei has also recruited a number of top AI scholars, including Ren Zhengfei himself, who mentioned basic academic topics in AI such as machine learning in his public speeches 10 years ago.
However, as an industry giant, Huawei's focus from the beginning was on how to implement its technology and how to integrate it with its business. The challenge was that the technology, which now seems to have a clear answer, was a huge problem in 2011.
Google's landmark paper, "Attention is All You Need," was published in 2017, six months after the Magic phone was released. Two years later, OpenAI embarked on its path of developing large language models, attempting to achieve better results by brute-force training data with massive computing power.
Previously, Huawei and I had already developed some basic technical ideas and paid attention to the "fastweights" that Hinton mentioned in his early years, considering it a kindred spirit—it was this concept that inspired and influenced Google's famous paper "Attention is All You Need".There are mathematical connections between everything, and intelligent systems can find these interconnected red lines.
In 2012, during a report to Huawei's senior management, the IMAX team used lines from the opening of the American TV series "Touch" to describe the interconnectedness of everything in the world. The show's narration specifically noted that these lines originated in China.
The iMAX project team's mission was to build an intelligent system before ChatGPT, or even before the Transformer architecture, officially emerged.
In late 2012, the largest available internet data came from several social media platforms. Based on this data, the IMAX team trained a rudimentary "language model" system, which also included some specific hand-crafted rules.Some of the ideas and practices in this regard are very similar to those later adopted by OpenAI on ChatGPT.
Obtaining such a system is just the beginning of the challenges and difficulties of creating an AI phone. How to fit such an intelligent system into a phone presents an even greater and more difficult technical, engineering, and market challenge, encompassing several aspects:
In 2012, the storage and chip processing capabilities of smartphones at the time were insufficient to support and accommodate such a large and complex system, and could not contain so many rules.
Apple's first phone with an NPU chip and AI algorithms was released in 2018, and Apple used it only to solve facial recognition issues.
The Magic phone, released at the end of 2016, uses more complex algorithms, including determining whether to display information on the screen based on the user's eye movements, and deciding whether to directly generate calendar reminders, navigation information, and purchase information based on the user's communication.
Today, some of these features are still retained in Huawei's high-end flagship phones.Some of them have even become role models for the "AI phones" that are currently being released.
The challenges extend beyond the combination of hardware and systems. From a market perspective, the timing for this type of phone to be recognized and accepted by users and the market is far from ripe; and there are also significant challenges in internal organizational communication.
The process of the iMAX system evolving into the Magic phone was actually a process of exploring the edge of survival.
Huawei's forward-thinking strategic vision and awareness, along with its strong supply chain and robust software and hardware teams, enabled this project to transform from a strategic concept into a real product, allowing the Magic phone to enter the market 10 years ago.
The essence of AI phones: the phone "immerses" itself in a large model, rather than the model being stuffed into the phone.
Three months ago, I came across a new book, *Project Maven*, which tells the story of a Marine Corps colonel who, despite internal and external pressures, pushed the U.S. military to adopt AI technology to transform its combat methods. The book mentions the technological and organizational challenges brought about by AI, which are very similar to the progress of Huawei's iMAX project, something I have personally experienced.
Looking closely at the current attempts of several major manufacturers and AI model companies to develop AI smartphones, while admiring the courage of these entrepreneurs, we also deeply feel the challenges of their paths.
Given the current technological and capital conditions, Apple, Huawei, OpenAI, and various major model manufacturers have joined forces to try and explore true AI smartphones.
The end of smartphone usage seems to be fast approaching.But as Magic's progress and ending demonstrate, combining a truly intelligent AI system with hardware is fraught with challenges, from design to chips and systems, and especially the business model.
The hardware, market, and business model challenges that Magic once faced, as well as the explorations it made, are worth reflecting on and learning from for today's AI smartphone explorers.
The essence of AI phones lies in enabling the AI system to exist proactively yet silently, understanding users and human nature. It's about immersing the phone in a "large model," rather than stuffing the "model" into the phone.
Even with better software algorithms and intelligent models today than they were 10 years ago, technology, engineering, and product development remain key factors.If mobile phone hardware is outsourced, it's difficult to talk about "immersing" it in a large model.
In terms of products, given the extremely immature algorithms and hardware at the time, Magic not only grasped the strategic direction of AI phones but also encountered some practical engineering challenges in integrating AI algorithms into mobile phone hardware. These included issues such as how to protect user data and privacy, and how to implement the various rules governing AI algorithms in complex scenarios.
For AI hardware to be more closely integrated with user data, it involves user data security and privacy protection. After the release of Magic, it drew a strong backlash from an internet giant, who demanded the removal of the Magic Live system, citing user data concerns. At the time, a Huawei executive personally responded to inquiries, presciently proposing the idea that data belongs to the user and should serve the user.
Judging from the final results of the iMAX and Magic projects, how to build a business model for AI phones is the most worthwhile topic to discuss.Currently, major smartphone manufacturers and internet apps have formed a perfect alliance in terms of business models.
App developers rely on major mobile phone manufacturers to ensure their user base, while major mobile phone manufacturers rely on apps to generate profits far exceeding those of mobile phone hardware. The core of this model is bidding for rankings.
Magic's AI phone approach of "application calling application"It has bridged the gap between the division of labor between apps and hardware platforms, while also eroding the advertising-based business model of major mobile phone manufacturers.
Whether this approach to smartphones was worthwhile during the golden age of smartphone growth over the past decade is a matter of Huawei's own judgment and choice. Since apps themselves have already generated substantial profits for major smartphone manufacturers, why create an application on top of an application, thus revolutionizing themselves?
In terms of sales volume, the Magic phone was negligible within the entire Huawei ecosystem. Afterwards, Honor retained the Magic brand but shut down the Magic Live system, the application that could access other apps.
Over the past year, OpenAI has made many commercialization attempts, among which advertising still has the greatest potential.
Before the release of Magic, I left Huawei and the iMAX project and went on to work for two large financial giants in the field of fintech, focusing on big data and artificial intelligence. I also continued to review, analyze and reflect on the iMAX project.
The corresponding consideration is that for AI-powered smartphones to achieve success, they cannot be separated from AI-driven innovation in application services.While serving users, AI smartphones must provide opportunities for value creation and also offer greater opportunities for commercial success through application innovation.
Current AI smartphones, including the Magic from 10 years ago, have not yet ventured into this field.