Qualcomm CEO: 'Resistance Is Futile' As 6G Mobile Revolution Approaches (fortune.com) 107
At Mobile World Congress, Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm argued that the coming 6G networks will power an AI-driven "agent economy," where devices and AI assistants constantly communicate across the network. "AI will fundamentally change our mobile experiences," Qualcomm chief executive, Cristiano Amon says. "It's going to change how we think about our smartphones. Think about our personal computing. Think about and interact with a car. The car is now a computing surface. If you actually believe in the AI revolution, 6G will be required. Resistance is futile." The company says early consumer testing could begin around the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, with broader rollouts expected by 2029. Fortune's Kamal Ahmed reports: Akash Palkhiwala is Qualcomm's chief financial officer and chief operating officer. I spent some time with him at the company's stand, as his leading engineers took me through a 6G future where individuals will have real-time information delivered to them via their glasses. Palkhiwala compliments me on my watch, which only does one thing. It tells me the time. "6G is going to be the first time that connectivity and AI come together in the network. What we're building is the first AI-native wireless network that's ever been built," he explains.
"The traffic that we expect on 6G is way different than what we had before," says Palkhiwala. "Before, it was all about consumer traffic. We expect 6G to be driven by [AI] agent traffic. Think about all these use cases where there are AI agents sitting on various devices -- your glasses, your watch, your phone, your PC. These agents are going to be talking back and forth across the network to other agents and services. "The traffic completely changes. 6G is being built with this idea that the traffic that goes on the network is not just going to be consumer voice calls or downloading videos, we're going to have agents talking to each other, so the reliability of the network becomes very important."
On-device capabilities (the ability of your phone to process far more data); edge computing (locally sourced IT technology rather than distant data centers); more efficient use of available bandwidth (AI-enabled load control); and greater cloud access will all come together to produce a new wireless network. [...] "Today we are in the application economy," he notes. "On the phone, you want to make a travel reservation, you go to one application. You want to order an Uber, you go to a second application. You want to order food, you go to a third application, movie tickets, etc. The user has to go through that effort. In the future, you think of the app economy moving over to an agent economy, where there's one agent I'm interacting with, and I can ask that agent to book me a movie ticket or a plane ticket, to order food for me, get an Uber for me. It knows everything about me."
"The traffic that we expect on 6G is way different than what we had before," says Palkhiwala. "Before, it was all about consumer traffic. We expect 6G to be driven by [AI] agent traffic. Think about all these use cases where there are AI agents sitting on various devices -- your glasses, your watch, your phone, your PC. These agents are going to be talking back and forth across the network to other agents and services. "The traffic completely changes. 6G is being built with this idea that the traffic that goes on the network is not just going to be consumer voice calls or downloading videos, we're going to have agents talking to each other, so the reliability of the network becomes very important."
On-device capabilities (the ability of your phone to process far more data); edge computing (locally sourced IT technology rather than distant data centers); more efficient use of available bandwidth (AI-enabled load control); and greater cloud access will all come together to produce a new wireless network. [...] "Today we are in the application economy," he notes. "On the phone, you want to make a travel reservation, you go to one application. You want to order an Uber, you go to a second application. You want to order food, you go to a third application, movie tickets, etc. The user has to go through that effort. In the future, you think of the app economy moving over to an agent economy, where there's one agent I'm interacting with, and I can ask that agent to book me a movie ticket or a plane ticket, to order food for me, get an Uber for me. It knows everything about me."
Riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
And all our cars are currently connected to each other in that glorious network we were promised would come with 5G.
I'll believe it when I see it
Re:Riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, as of 5G they stopped just saying 'faster and better', now each turn of the crank they feel like they need some 'narrative' to rationalize faster and better.
With 5G the buzzword du jour was 'Internet of Things', and accordingly 5G was going to be needed because everything would have a cellular radio, and 5G was only really needed because of that, *maybe* a whiff of AR/VR too.
6G *of course* the buzzword is AI...
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Actually, even 5G hasn't made it out to where I live, and probably to many other areas. So 6G is likely to take awhile. Mind you, they started charging for it a few years ago, and changed the frequencies used by the phone, so I had to get a new one...but they didn't get around to actually building the thing.
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I live in a metro area and my mobile data connection is still faux 5G (5Ge)
So, yeah 5G is far from ubiquitous.
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We've had 5G, but I leave it disabled because it doesn't do anything useful except drain my battery faster. I don't see that changing: I do the same thing to any AI features that allow it. 6G is probably even more irrelevant.
If I was obsessed with watching movies on a tiny screen with bad controls, maybe.
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Yeah, what does AI have to do with data speed anyway? Unless you're using it to actually build a new AI by running crawlers to rip the Internet I don't see how it's relevant. And do marketing people really not understand yet that AI is not perceived positively at the moment by almost anyone?
At least with 4G it was "You can stream videos" and 5G "You can replace your wired home connection" which kinda made sense. But I guess they don't know what is better than that and now they're just clutching at trends an
Re: Riiight (Score:2)
Re:Riiight (Score:4, Informative)
I typically work wit large enterprises, and when you're spending 100's of millions, if not billions of dollars on a factory, why would you use cheap IoT sensors, when you can hardwire industrial sensors you know will work for a very long time? and then you don't need to deal with all the EMF noise manufacturing hardware produces These other companies trying to push 5G would make suggestions, and I'd respond with "we've been doing that for years with wifi". The whole 5G IIoT (Industrial IoT) was a solution looking for a problem.
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I don't want marketing fantasies, just keep making it faster and more reliable. That's all anyone cares about. Nobody is excited by "AI agents talking to each other ALL THE TIME!", just as nobody was excited by the idea of a billion IoT devices talking to each other all the damn time. People care about cell service for their cell phones. Anything else is a waste of breath.
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The AI agents aren't for our use or benefit. We ARE the product and the AI agents are the means of harvesting that juicy info.
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With 5G the buzzword du jour was 'Internet of Things', and accordingly 5G was going to be needed because everything would have a cellular radio, and 5G was only really needed because of that, *maybe* a whiff of AR/VR too.
You talk as if this isn't actually a thing which happened. Yes everything does have a cellular radio, they are absolutely everywhere. In some places every traffic light has one, there's one in every meter box in our street (the suburb got an upgrade 2 years ago thanks to the end of the old network smart meters relied on). There's multiple 5G cells in the canal behind my house measuring level and water quality across a few different places across the locks.
And above all many people no longer have a phone, th
Re: Riiight (Score:2)
Re:Riiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I the ONLY one that does NOT want more computing and more connectivity and more monitoring in my fscking car?!?!
Thankfully my slightly older car is low mileage and in great shape, so hoping I don't have to buy another any time soon....but geez, next one I do will take tons of research and then figuring out how to rip out most of the "phone home" and other tech I don't want annoying me, tracking me or limiting me on how/where I want to drive...
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don't worry, cars are for people that have jobs, "AI will fundamentally change our" job market.
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Am I the ONLY one that does NOT want more computing and more connectivity and more monitoring in my fscking car?!?!
No, you are not.
I remember that a few years ago tractors made in India were becoming popular in the US. They didn't have the hyper-tech lock-in and lock-down that John "nothing scams like a" Deere was cramming down farmers' throats. They just did what a tractor is meant to do, and they could be serviced and repaired by the farmers themselves.
Maybe someday India will also export passenger vehicles that do one thing and do it well - move people from point A to point B reliably and safely. Then I can have a ca
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Thanks - I wasn't aware that the Indian tractors had a bad rep.
Re: Riiight (Score:2)
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I was talking with friends...and all of us have decent jobs, decent earnings with disposable income.
We would pay top dollar if Jeep, made....well, a Jeep again.
I'm talking bare bones...100% mechanical....something like a CJ7 type thing...easy to work on, no computers, just something simple and mechanical that you could mod as you wished....and could drive through the woods, and do 4 wheeling stuff.
I don't need a fucking backup camera or ABS brakes, etc....
I'd pay EXTRA to h
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Re: Riiight (Score:2)
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wasn't 4g also limited? i remember some LTE related conversations, same shit different hole
No it won't (Score:5, Insightful)
"AI will fundamentally change our mobile experiences," Qualcomm chief executive, Cristiano Amon says. "It's going to change how we think about our smartphones."
No, no it fucking won't. Stop talking about this crap as if it were the Second Coming of Christ.
It's embarrassing to listen to this hypetastic douchebag Cristiano Amon glaze everyone about a fucking new radio protocol that he *claims* is going to revolutionize the world. It won't, calm the fuck down.
It's wifi, not free energy. Get a grip buddy.
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"It's going to change how we think about our smartphones."
Yeah, they're not completely the enemy yet.
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He's cheering for the Panopticon.
How long does he think the range of 6G is going to be? I don't even have 5G and I can walk a half mile to a place I can see the cell phone tower.
That brings up a question, how many people have to be in the coverage area before 5G is cost effective?
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Well said! I have no mod points, so instead I give you my thanks.
Re:Gelsinger.... (Score:1)
He's literally building an AI to hasten the coming of Christ.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
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*claims* is going to revolutionize the world. It won't, calm the fuck down.
Actually it has. I agree with your premise, it won't change the smartphone, but it absolutely does revolutionise the world. 4G provided bandwidth to do on mobile what previously was unheard of. 5G provided a level of device subscriber count support that very much has changed how corporations and government deploy wireless services (yes IoT is a thing that is very wide spread even if you can't see it) and at the time of 5G's development 4G networks were suffering from very real subscriber count limitations (
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Stop sucking Cristiano Amon's cock so hard or the top of your head will cave in like it did the last time.
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Cristiano Amon was wrong when he said, "It's going to change how we think about our smartphones." It won't.
He talked and used a lot of words but I didn't really hear anything. More of the usual "Blah blah amazing! blah blah revolutionary! blah blah paradigm-shifting! blah blah blah"
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ooooo. I can't wait to see how much better my 6G phone experience will be on my next flip phone that will replace my current flip phone.
Resistance is futile? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Resistance is futile? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Qualcomm chief executive might think that quoting Star Trek makes them sound cool and with it, but he may want to reconsider quoting the bad guys. He may also want to remember that ultimately, even in that fictional universe, the Borg were defeated.
The quote the bad guys intentionally at this point. The tech CEOs have made it abundantly clear that they view all the warnings in sci-fi as roadmaps to glory, and this particular CEO quoting the Borg just makes it even more clear that they view the bad guys as the heroes of the story. And their ultimate goal is to re-write the sci-fi future into one where the bad guys always win, because they think the bad guys were cooler.
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The Qualcomm chief executive might think that quoting Star Trek makes them sound cool and with it, but he may want to reconsider quoting the bad guys. He may also want to remember that ultimately, even in that fictional universe, the Borg were defeated.
The quote the bad guys intentionally at this point. The tech CEOs have made it abundantly clear that they view all the warnings in sci-fi as roadmaps to glory, and this particular CEO quoting the Borg just makes it even more clear that they view the bad guys as the heroes of the story. And their ultimate goal is to re-write the sci-fi future into one where the bad guys always win, because they think the bad guys were cooler.
I don't necessarily disagree with you here, it's fairly impossible to think that saying "resistance is futile" is an accident or a coincidence. The CEOs might also want to remember that the rest of the world doesn't think like they do.
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The quote the bad guys intentionally at this point. The tech CEOs have made it abundantly clear that they view all the warnings in sci-fi as roadmaps to glory, and this particular CEO quoting the Borg just makes it even more clear that they view the bad guys as the heroes of the story. And their ultimate goal is to re-write the sci-fi future into one where the bad guys always win, because they think the bad guys were cooler.
I don't necessarily disagree with you here, it's fairly impossible to think that saying "resistance is futile" is an accident or a coincidence. The CEOs might also want to remember that the rest of the world doesn't think like they do.
I don't think they have any incentive to accept that particular bit of reality. Anyone not already in their club doesn't count to them. They emulate and ideate on their heroes, and their ultimate hero at the moment is Donald Trump, a man who essentially bluffed his way into being viewed as a great businessman despite his continual failures when starting out with the backing of daddy's money, and is now leader of the United States based purely on his ability to portray himself as a despicable, disgusting, se
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Or they identify with the bad guys. Cooler by definition
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The Qualcomm chief executive might think that quoting Star Trek makes them sound cool and with it, but he may want to reconsider quoting the bad guys.
100% agree. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
I am Coffee of Borg (Score:5, Informative)
Decaf is irrelevant. You will be percolated.
Seriously, AI is nothing like as significant as touted -- and I do use AI a fair bit. It is not particularly robust or reliable, it generates large numbers of errors, it crashes frequently, it consumes vast resources, and the results are of dubious value. The code it generates is sloppy, it takes months to years of repeated cycles to do any but the most basic of engineering tasks, and in terms of cost efficiency, it costs rougly three orders of magnitude more to use AI than to use people of equivalent ability. AI is decent at pattern-matching, but only if you understand the problem space well enough - and most people are far too incompetent to do that.
6G is good, 6G is useful, but not for AI.
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It looks like most of the features are generic stuff that we want anyway, like lower latency and better energy efficiency. AI is just some marketing bullshit layered on top for investors looking to throw money at something.
6G won't be here until the early 2030s. Huawei has 5.5G which includes early adoption of some of the 6G tech, which seems to be helping them get ahead by having real-world experience of deployment and performance. A smart move.
China also has the largest number of 6G patents, followed by t
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A fair point, but we know that the truth is that as bandwidth goes up, people load their websites more, so we end up with limited improvement for those who are on fast connections and massive consequences for those on slower connections.
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CEOs Say the Darndest Things (Score:3)
As if I didn't need an incentive not to buy anything from Qualcomm, I just got another.
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You aren't a Qualcomm customer*. Someone else will make that choice for you.
*Unless you work for a firm that decides on the technical elements that goes into products, then you may be Qualcomm's customer. But then I do hope you put more thought into your decision rather than not liking a CEO's words.
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Tl;DR (Score:2)
Big Tech is rolling out high-speed mobile data so the dead internet can flow easier.
Re: Tl;DR (Score:2)
"It" can fuck right off (Score:5, Interesting)
It knows everything about me
You can shove your dystopian future where the sun don't shine, is what I think.
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so sayeth the POS anon
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Kew-kew-kew
I for one am glad for 6G (Score:3)
If only for the fact that "Five-Gee" is so much catchier as a phrase to say that 6G won't have nearly as many conspiracies and other nonsense around it. Even if they dont change anything but the name. Can network upgrades just be boring market speak again?
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"Fuck everything we're doing 8 G's"
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"He's gone to plaid."
I don't buy it. (Score:2)
Mobile is the one case where I don't see a lot of good reasons people would want much on device compute for things like inferences.
It is a huge energy suck and nobody, even with relatively convenient induction charging surfaces around wants to pull their phone out of the pocket to charge constantly.
Nobody really wants to tank the battery life of their mobile either given batteries are either not end user service items or are a huge PITA for those adventurous enough to do it anyway, with lots of extra cycles
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Actually, were the AI sufficiently good, I can see a large use case for voice controlled phones. But it would need to continue to work when the signal failed. And it would need to be able to recognize the voice of the owner when the owner had a bad cold. And to refuse commands coming from someone else.
That said, I think we're a bit distant from that level of capability. (Admittedly, I haven't checked recently.)
Peanut Butter and Chocolate (Score:3)
Mixing AI and Comms is just a way for tech companies to obfuscate the product enough to make it look it is delivering some value when it reality, it is just doing Comms.
A lot of tech companies are doing this in one form or another to inflate the value of their product or service.
Pelase (Score:3)
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Hey get in line, no cutting.
At some point (Score:2)
It's not good enough to roll out a new generation of wireless standards, if it doesn't have an improvement for a majority of customers. The implementation of 5G was nice for some people but most people only need 4G. But the biggest problem is a lot of carriers increase the frequency which decreases range and so at least for me I was disappointed with the roll out of 5G. And I definitely don't need more bandwidth right now than 5G, streaming video is good enough for me. One thing that needs to be improved is
1Tb/s (Score:2)
We expect 6G to be driven by [AI] agent traffic. Think about all these use cases where there are AI agents sitting on various devices -- your glasses, your watch, your phone, your PC. These agents are going to be talking back and forth across the network to other agents and services.
Ahh, well then at least promise me not to directly implant it into my cerebral cortex until at least 7g.
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nah that's too sophisticated a use for a load bearing animal like humans. you will bear the battery and equipment of your enslavement and like it.
AI Agents, huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
What if I want to be the agent of my like and my communications? Where is control of my agency in this scenario?
I want robots to do menial tasks like mowing my yard quietly at night, doing the dishes, cleaning the floors, self-driving cars etc. Not deciding for me what groceries will show up at my door and, consequently, accept what meal I've been assigned to eat.
Some humans like making decisions and coursing their own lives, but maybe that is soon to return to the realm of the power elite.
Meh...it's still 5-10 years off (Score:4, Informative)
6G isn't even close to being ready so I find Qualcomm's shilling to be laughable.
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hot shot (Score:2)
Put him a few weeks on the production lines. That will teach him about resistance.
I'm keeping ... (Score:2)
And it seems that Gen Z is catching up with me.
How do you determine what it's capable off ? (Score:2)
And yet, it has a button for vocal commands, without a peep about it in the manual. I have no idea what it's capable of, I've tried to get it to change radio and it kinda works, but can I tell it to drive to Moscow by itself ? Or warn me about cops along the road ? Or sear
This is *negative* progress (Score:2)
> On the phone, you want to make a travel reservation, you go to one application. You want to order an Uber, you go to a second application. You want to order food, you go to a third application, movie tickets, etc. The user has to go through that effort. In the future, you think of the app economy moving over to an agent economy, where there's one agent I'm interacting with, and I can ask that agent to book me a movie ticket or a plane ticket, to order food for me, get an Uber for me...
Oh my god, this f
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Telecom Wireless Company Buzzword Soup (Score:4, Interesting)
Qualcomm makes telecom wireless chips and lower tier processors and the upcoming 6G will increase bandwidth at the cost of increased latency and lowered distance from the tower. Anything to do with PI features over the wireless telecom network will be incidental.
Agent based communications will be text based or condensed and compressed mutually negotiated binary format for efficiency of transmission for speed and lower latency for responses. That's not going to require additional bandwidth of 6G since it won't be mixed media nor high bandwidth video transmissions.
PI agents will eventually communicate to each other as the preferred interface method over classic APIs, but that is going to be like trying to use foreign language translators to interpret meaning, sublety, and original intent of the prompter as it's translated through the telephone game over multiple hops, losing meaning and coherence at each step of the way.
Nothing to do with new 6G wireless protocol and chip sets.
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and the upcoming 6G will increase bandwidth at the cost of increased latency and lowered distance from the tower.
Citation Needed. Virtually every advance in mobile tech has improved QoS mechanisms to control what devices needs speed and latency. This isn't an either-or game. Nothing inherent to the air interface has made latency worse.
Ever since I was a negative G (Score:2)
I still get dropped calls (Score:2)
They really need to focus on eliminating dead zones. In my quest for caffeine in the morning (7-mile journey) there are three dead zones lasting a total 20% of the ride time. I pass at least 6 towers (two full size and four microcells) on the trip.
So 6G will facilitate a network of AI agents... (Score:1)
...all capable of communicating with each other at tremendous speed. A network of independent AI agents in the sky. A skynet?
What could possibly go wrong?
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NO KIDDING!!
The statement
"..It knows everything about me. "
SHOULD have any normal human being screaming and running for the exits...
Can't come soon enough! (Score:2)
It's getting harder to find Qualcomm chips though (Score:2)
I guess you can sometimes find older phones as new stock with a Qualcomm chip but that doesn't necessarily help Qualcomm. But apple is starting to move over to their own chips they just haven'
Internet of Things (Score:1)
Just like the Internet of Things over 5G was going to revolutionise everything a decade ago.
Qualcomm still has visions of UNLIMITED money (Score:1)
Data caps (Score:4, Insightful)
5G is muted in its usability thanks to bridge troll behavior by the cell service providers. Who cares if you can download at 1 TB/s if your speed gets capped after 20 GB, or your monthly data runs out after half a second at max rate?
The relatively small amount of data limits on the wired web is largely responsible for its ubiquity and growth, cell data has always been a bottleneck and the data limits have grown vastly slower than the underlying technology allows. The gap is all the profiteering by the telcoms, and until those bridge trolls are somehow neutered we will continue to have amazing technology that will be heavily underutilized.
Oh Dear God No (Score:1)
I don't want a bunch of half-assed agents using my passwords, screwing up all my accounts, being a HUGE security risk. I really don't.
Maybe the telecom industry should fulfill all the glorious promises of 5G before charting a new realm of BS.
just no (Score:2)
FOS (Score:2)
Why are companies leaders always so full of shit?
So it is 2011 now? (Score:2)
Why aren't we seeing AI CEO's or other C-suite? (Score:2)
Doesn't seem that hard to take "buzz word of the day/week/month/year" and use it to pretend your product announcement matters for it.
"How do I take a commodity, and jazz up this really expensive yet incremental in effect 'upgrade'?"
Minutes (Score:2)
Kinda sounds like he is just excited at the idea of phones using up minutes without the user even asking it to. No longer will billable time be restricted to users making decisions to consume something, the phones will consume it for them!
Just what we needed! (Score:2)
Subtract the buzzword advertizing (Score:2)
All right, I'll get that kid to eat. (Score:1)