OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer, for better and for worse. Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, AI Eraser. Before you ask, no, this is not just a rebadged version of Google’s very good Magic Eraser.
No, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in an effort to show the world that it has its own AI ambitions. It’s likely that the Oppo-owned company has been working on AI Eraser for a while now – although the world has known about Google’s version since the Pixel 6 event in March 2021 (Magic Editor, meanwhile, debuted there a year ago at I/O 2023. ).
According to its press materials, the company built this thing from the ground up, starting with its own large proprietary language models.
“AI Eraser is the result of a substantial investment in R&D by OnePlus,” the company notes in its press release. “The proprietary LLM behind the new feature was trained on a large dataset that allows it to understand complex scenes. With this advanced visual understanding, AI Eraser is able to intelligently replace unwanted objects with contextually appropriate elements that naturally enhance the appeal of the photo, giving users the ability to perform high-quality photo edits anywhere. anywhere and anytime.
An AI-powered eraser is an undeniably convenient feature, but it’s also one that Google immediately knocked out of the park. It’s probably not the best use of its R&D resources to tackle this feature, especially one currently available on iOS and Android devices through Google Photos.
More than anything, this seems to be an attempt by OnePlus to plant its flag in what is shaping up to be the year of the smartphone. Hopefully next time he’ll use these resources to build something that will truly differentiate itself from existing properties.
AI is rolling out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open, and OnePlus Nord CE 4. It won’t come to the market, however. R12-D12.
techcrunch
