Samsung Galaxy S25 could get this huge AI upgrade

News
By published

Galaxy AI could lessen its reliance on the cloud

Samsung Galaxy S25 render
(Image credit: OnLeaks)

Samsung has bet big on AI throughout 2024, and it should be no surprise to hear that there may be some serious upgrades coming in the near future. A new leak claims that one such upgrade could see the Samsung Galaxy S25 lessen its reliance on the cloud, and do more AI processing locally on your device.

This nugget of information comes from AssembleDebug on X, during a dive into Samsung app code. Judging from the snippet they posted, it looks like the S25 series may start processing more things locally — starting with generative AI photo editing. You can see that below, where it says “FEATURE_GEN_EDIT_ON_DEVICE”

There are a bunch of benefits to doing this kind of processing locally, rather than in a cloud server. The most obvious is privacy, which could be very important if you’re editing private photos. Since the photos don’t need to be transmitted to a cloud server for processing, it means the files can’t be intercepted by bad actors en route or secretly saved on a Samsung server.

In theory the processing should be faster too, since everything stays on your phone. While transmitting files too and from cloud servers doesn’t take long, it’s not instantaneous — so you end up waiting longer for everything to finish. That’s assuming there isn’t a backlog that the server needs to clear, which will only increase your wait time. On-device processing means you don’t need an active internet connection to utilize AI features. So it doesn’t matter if you’ve run out of data, or stuck on a plane with no Wi-Fi, you’re not cut off from AI.

That said, doing everything on-device does mean that it’s more taxing on your phone, and excessive editing may cause your battery life to drain slightly faster than it would with cloud processing. But the trade-off is probably worth it.

The code AssembleDebug posted also seems to corroborate rumors that the Galaxy S25 will exclusively run on the Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. The leaker claims that there’s no sign of hardware from Exynos or MediaTek when on-device AI is referred to. Instead we only see the “sm8750”, which is a model number for Snapdragon’s newest flagship SoC. That corroborates previous rumors that all Galaxy S25 phones will run on Snapdragon chips.

It’s unclear if any other Galaxy AI features may transition to on-device processing. But if this leak turns out to be accurate, it doesn’t discount the possibility that more AI features could go down that route. It's worth noting that both Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini offer various on-device features, including generative AI. However only Apple offers generative AI-based image editing on-device.

At the very least, it’s a good start. But we’ll have to wait and see what Samsung has to say when it reveals the Galaxy S25 in the new year.

Rumor has it that the next Galaxy Unpacked will happen on January 22, and until then you can keep an eye on all the best news and rumors in our Samsung Galaxy S25 and Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hubs.

More from Tom's Guide

TOPICS
Tom Pritchard
Tom Pritchard
UK Phones Editor

Tom is the Tom's Guide's UK Phones Editor, tackling the latest smartphone news and vocally expressing his opinions about upcoming features or changes. It's long way from his days as editor of Gizmodo UK, when pretty much everything was on the table. He’s usually found trying to squeeze another giant Lego set onto the shelf, draining very large cups of coffee, or complaining about how terrible his Smart TV is.