The Korean electronics giants are setting up to integrate their latest Galaxy S24 flagship series with AI (artificial intelligence) technology from Baidu.
Baidu is a Chinese search engine. A couple of days ago, the China division and Baidu AI Cloud announced a strategic partnership that will appear on the latest Galaxy S24 series. After being announced in the US, it will be released in China on January 25, stationing the Ernie large language model (LLM) of Baidu and the search engine for supporting the AI search functions of the handsets.
Most of those functions, customized especially for the Chinese market, mirror features provided by Gemini AI of Google, which helps the global version of the Galaxy S24 series but is not available in China.
However, many Chinese consumers have taken to social media to express their concerns regarding the search features on the local version of the Galaxy S24 series, which may not be as good as those on the international variants.
Weibo users speculate that the overseas variant differs significantly from the mainland version. He also revealed that he had visited a Samsung store in Hong Kong to test the multiple models and found that the “Circle to Search” feature, which is powered by Baidu, provided much fewer results than the overseas variant supported by Google.
Baidu is considered one of the top AI systems in China. It is also the country’s first firm to launch its own ChatGPT alternative, while Ernie Bot launched back in March 2023.
A 30-year-old, Richar Zhang, residing in Beijing, stated that he was planning to buy an overseas variant of the Galaxy S24 just to experience the best AI services.
Back in September 2023, the brand revealed the latest version of its LLM, Ernie 4.0, which Baidu stated was “by no means inferior compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4” in general capabilities.
Apart from all these, the partnership between Samsung and Baidu is not expected to remarkably boost the South Korean firm’s standing in the Chinese tech industry, where its share has reached a new low, which is 1% from 20% over the past decade.
On the other hand, the rise of Chinese vendors from Huawei Technologies to Oppo and Vivo releasing their own LLMS or integrating generative AI features in their latest generation handsets, and somewhere, it is also a kind of challenge for Samsung. In China, the Korean giants have set prices for the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy S24+ at between 500 yuan and 800 yuan (US$70 and US$112). This is higher as compared to its predecessor series, the Galaxy S23 and Galaxy S23+ smartphones.
As per the recent survey by Peng Peng, it revealed that Samsung kept the same price tags in the US and reduced prices in Europe.
