Sources, a newsletter and podcast by Alex Heath, published an interview with Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon on 11 October. It was recorded at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii. Amon said AI companies are already asking Qualcomm to support models of at least 100 billion parameters on phones by 2028. Parameters are the learned settings inside a model, so more of them means a bigger model. He said the AI would run all the time. Sources notes that Qualcomm makes chips for Android phones, Meta's smart glasses and coming devices from AI companies like OpenAI.
These are Amon's statements, as relayed by Sources. The write-up does not say which AI companies made the request. It gives no detail on the phone hardware, memory needs or prices involved. Amon also bet that people who put off upgrades because of high memory prices will buy new phones once AI agents arrive. That is his expectation, not a measured result. Separately, he expects 6G demonstrations at the 2028 LA Olympics and early rollouts around 2029 to 2030.
Amon says AI agents will use people's apps and act for them, so teams that build apps sit at the centre of his view. Sources also reports that Qualcomm's purchase of Modular is meant to give developers software that works across rival chips, including Nvidia's.