Samsung jumps on the generative AI bandwagon with Gauss

Samsung is the latest major technology company to debut an own-brand generative AI framework, dubbed Gauss, with the announcement Wednesday that it would feature heavily in the firm’s future product portfolio.

Gauss is named for Carl Friedrich Gauss, a 19^th-century German mathematician who helped complete the fundamental theorem of algebra, among numerous other discoveries. Gauss, according to Samsung, also established normal distribution theory, which describes the most common continuous probability distribution – a fundamental underpinning of the work that has gone into machine learning and artificial intelligence research.

“Furthermore, the name reflects Samsung’s ultimate vision for the models, which is to draw from all the phenomena and knowledge in the world in order to harness the power of AI to improve the lives of consumers everywhere,” Samsung said in a blog post.

Generative AI headed for mobile phones

Few details were immediately available about Gauss, but the company did say that it plans to integrate three core functions of it into its consumer products in the future. The first part is Samsung Gauss Language, a large language model (LLM) that performs now-familiar generative AI tasks with text, including translation, document summaries and email generation. Samsung said Gauss Language will also allow for improved voice controls on its products.

Gauss Code is the second part of the generative AI triumvirate, according to the company. It’s a code generation tool designed for use in in-house software development, allowing for faster development as well as test case generation and code description. Finally, Gauss Image brings a Midjourney or DALL-E-like capability to Samsung devices, offering the ability to generate creative images from a prompt or sharpen low-resolution pictures into higher resolutions.

Samsung also pledged to abide by security and privacy guidelines for responsible AI development, the blog post noted.

“Samsung is not only developing AI technologies, but also moving forward with various activities that ensure safe AI usage,” the company said. “Through the AI Red Team, Samsung continues to strengthen the ability to proactively eliminate and monitor security and privacy issues that may arise in the entire process — ranging from data collection to AI model development, service deployment and AI-generated results — all with the principles of AI ethics in mind.”

Ritu Jyoti, group vice president for AI and automation at IDC, said that consumer-facing AI is the technology of the moment, and that it will be interesting to see whether Gauss debuts on the upcoming Galaxy S24 smartphone.

“While individually, Samsung Gauss Language, Code or Image models are not necessarily groundbreaking, if integrated into their products collectively with the right safety and security, [they] can be transformative from consumer experience perspective,” she said.

Samsung said that Gauss is currently in use internally, but did not provide a more specific timeline for public deployments. Gauss is a relative latecomer to the generative AI space, but is among the first manufacturers of consumer hardware to enter the market.