Samsung Wants AI That Actually Does Stuff - September 15, 2025

Samsung wants to build AI into every gadget they make, from phones to fridges to washing machines. Their annual AI conference is basically them showing off to researchers while figuring out how to compete with Google and Apple on AI without depending on OpenAI or Microsoft.

The chip advantage

Samsung makes their own processors, which means they can optimize AI performance at the hardware level instead of just running ChatGPT wrappers like everyone else. That's actually smart - while other companies are paying OpenAI billions for API access, Samsung can bake AI directly into their silicon.

Yoshua Bengio gave the keynote about "Scientist AI" - basically AI that tries to be factually correct instead of just telling you what you want to hear. Good fucking luck with that. Current language models are trained to be helpful and engaging, not necessarily truthful. Building truthful AI instead of pleasing AI is like making Google show you reality instead of what you want to see.

What they're actually working on

Using AI to design better chips (meta as hell), making smartphones that don't need cloud processing for AI features, and trying to get Bixby to stop being completely useless. Spoiler alert: Bixby still can't understand basic commands half the time. I asked it "set a 20 minute timer" last Tuesday and it opened Spotify and started playing K-pop. Classic Samsung.

The chip design stuff is genuinely interesting - AI designing AI chips creates a feedback loop that could accelerate hardware development. Assuming it doesn't create some recursive optimization nightmare that crashes everything.

The researcher awards went to professors working on AI security, time-series analysis, and robotics. Translation: Samsung wants secure AI that can predict when your appliances will break and robots that can fix them. Makes sense if you're trying to sell smart home ecosystems instead of just individual devices.

Samsung's betting they can make AI chips better than Nvidia while OpenAI and Google are focused on software. It's a decent strategy - everyone needs hardware eventually, and controlling the silicon gives them leverage other AI companies don't have. Plus Korean chaebol culture means they can actually coordinate across divisions instead of having internal teams compete against each other like American tech companies.

Day two was about AI that actually does your laundry instead of just explaining how to do laundry. Finally, Samsung's pushing "Agentic AI" - which means AI that does shit instead of just talking about doing shit.

What the hell is Agentic AI?

CTO Paul Cheun basically said "we're tired of AI that just talks back at you." Samsung wants their refrigerator to order milk when you're out, not lecture you about dairy nutrition for 10 minutes.

Current AI waits for you to ask it stuff. Agentic AI actually pays attention to what you're doing and helps without being asked. Your washing machine figures out you're washing delicates instead of making you scroll through 47 different settings like some kind of laundry expert.

The Smart People Explaining Why This Might Work

Samsung brought in three researchers who actually know what they're talking about:

Joseph E. Gonzalez from UC Berkeley figured out how to make AI learn while you're sleeping. "Sleep-time compute" means your phone gets smarter overnight instead of burning battery while you're trying to use it. About damn time.

Subbarao Kambhampati from ASU is fixing the fact that current AI models are basically really confident idiots. His "Large Reasoning Models" might actually think before they talk instead of just hallucinating with authority.

Stefano Ermon from Stanford is stealing the good parts of image AI (the stuff that actually works) and cramming it into text processing. If it works half as well as Stable Diffusion, we might finally get AI that doesn't sound like a corporate press release.

What Samsung's Actually Building

Instead of just talking about AI, they're shoving it into everything:

• Camera AI: Your phone camera finally stops making everyone look like they're dying of jaundice (though the face smoothing still makes you look like a plastic doll)
• Knowledge Distillation: Fancy way of saying "we figured out how to run AI without sending your data to the cloud every 5 seconds"
• On-Device AI: AI that actually works when your internet is shit, imagine that. Works great for about 10 minutes until your phone hits 85°C and throttles the CPU down to potato speed.
• Automatic Dubbing: Your Samsung TV can make Korean dramas sound like the actors speak English, without the usual robot voice. When it works. Half the time it just plays silence while the actors' mouths move.
• Multi-Agent Systems: Multiple AI programs that work together instead of fighting each other for CPU time. In theory. I've seen demo crashes where the agents get into infinite loops arguing with each other.
• Document AI: Finally, something that can read your messy PDFs without having a breakdown. Still chokes on documents with complex formatting, but baby steps.
• AI Development Studio: Tools for developers who want to build AI stuff without getting a PhD first

Samsung's playing the long game here. While OpenAI burns through billions making chatbots, Samsung's putting AI into billions of devices people actually use. Hard to argue with that strategy.

The Korea JoongAng Daily reports Samsung's done screwing around with research papers. This year it's all about shipping products that don't suck.