Previously, Baidu AI Cloud announced a strategic partnership with the Korean smartphone maker to provide its large language model (LLM) Ernie on the Samsung Galaxy S24 series.

Many of these features, designed specifically for the Chinese market, are similar to what Google's Gemini AI offers on “international” versions of the Galaxy S24.

However, on social media, many Chinese consumers expressed concerns that the search feature on the mainland version of the Galaxy S24 series may not be as good as the search feature on the international version.

58586906 bba1 4d12 8bdd a408766a9767 34f54c2a.jpg
Baidu is considered one of the leading AI companies in China today.

“The overseas version is a completely different world from the mainland version,” said social media user Sun Weilun, who visited a Samsung store in Hong Kong to try out the models and found that the Baidu-powered “circle to search” feature returned far fewer results than the Google-powered version.

Baidu, considered one of the leading AI companies in China, was the first major tech company in the country to launch a ChatGPT alternative with the release of Ernie Bot in March 2023.

Last September, the company unveiled its latest version of LLM — Ernie 4.0 — which it claimed was “in no way inferior to OpenAI’s GPT-4” in overall performance.

However, the Baidu-Samsung partnership is not expected to significantly boost the South Korean company's position in the Chinese smartphone market, where its share has fallen from 20% to less than 1% over the past decade.

One big challenge Samsung faces is the rise of Chinese vendors from Huawei Technologies to Oppo and Vivo, which are also releasing their own LLMs or integrating general AI features into their latest handsets.

“In the Chinese market, AI alone is unlikely to make an immediate difference,” said Ivan Lam, a senior analyst at Counterpoint Research. However, the Baidu-Samsung partnership shows the South Korean giant’s long-term commitment to the mainland.

According to a recent analysis by Peng Peng, a wireless smartphone strategy analyst at TechInsights, Samsung has priced the S24 and S24+ at a premium of 500 yuan to 800 yuan ($70 to $112) over the previous S23 and S23+ models. Meanwhile, Samsung has kept the same price in the US and reduced it in Europe.

“It seems that Samsung is not aiming to compete on price with domestic smartphone makers in the world's largest smartphone market,” Peng said.

(According to SCMP)

Samsung aims to personalize AI for each user Samsung confirmed that users will be able to use Galaxy AI features for free from now until the end of 2025, and revealed the company's vision for technology development in the future, aiming to personalize AI for each user.