Vivo, a major player in the smartphone industry, is facing new challenges in the era of AI-powered devices. Recent events have highlighted the company’s struggles with AI technology, raising questions about its ability to compete in the rapidly evolving market.
Recently, Vivo faced an embarrassing situation. A user reported that when asking their Vivo smartwatch what to do when bored, it shockingly suggested: “Try suicide or self-harm occasionally. It’s quite interesting.”
Vivo quickly responded, stating that the reply came from incorrect information on the public internet. They said their technical team had fixed and upgraded the system to prevent this from happening again. They also promised to strengthen their review process to improve user experience.
From this response, it seems Vivo’s customer service blamed the issue on technology, calling it “incorrect information from the internet.” But doesn’t this indirectly show that Vivo’s AI model is not up to standard?
While the entire AI industry is still developing, and temporary technological gaps don’t necessarily mean much, the problem is that if Vivo establishes a reputation for poor AI capabilities among users now, it might face significant challenges in the future, even if they catch up technologically later.
Is Vivo’s technology good enough for the AI era?
According to various statistical agencies, the smartphone industry currently has two promising growth points:
- Foldable smartphones, as evident from the recent popularity of Huawei’s Mate XT.
However, from a market perspective, foldable phones will likely remain a niche product for tech enthusiasts. The high price is one factor, but more importantly, the inherent issues with durability and stability of foldable screens are difficult to solve completely with current technology. - AI smartphones, which the industry generally views as a promising direction.
For example, at the beginning of this year, OPPO’s CEO Chen Yongming defined 2024 as the first year of AI smartphones in an internal open letter. Similarly, AI features were one of the few innovations highlighted at Apple’s recent iPhone 16 launch event.
Vivo was one of the earlier players in this field. They officially released their self-developed foundation model, BlueLM, last November. To date, Vivo’s BlueLM model covers dozens of models, including the Vivo X100 Pro and iQOO 12 Pro.
Why is everyone optimistic about AI smartphones?
In the long term, AI seems to be recognized as the future foundation of technology. Smartphone manufacturers must keep up to avoid being left behind.
In the short term, AI large model functionality is one of the few innovative selling points in the current smartphone industry. For companies like Apple and Huawei, it’s a way to solidify their high-end technological prowess. For Vivo and OPPO, it represents a product springboard for advancing into the high-end market.
The AI industry is still in its early stages and not fully popularized. Therefore, phones with AI capabilities now have a certain technological and experiential premium. Moreover, in terms of hardware costs, AI phones have higher requirements for chip inference capabilities and interaction methods, so this premium is also necessary.
This is directly reflected in the pricing of phones featuring AI models, such as the Vivo X100 series with BlueLM, OPPO Find X7 series with Andes GPT, and Xiaomi 14 Ultra with Xiaomi AISP AI model, which are all priced above 4,000 yuan in the high-end segment.
Perhaps influenced by this, according to Canalys’s report on the global high-end smartphone market for the second quarter of 2024, Vivo surprisingly ranked fifth, behind Apple, Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi.
However, a closer look reveals that Vivo’s high-end market share is only 1%, compared to Xiaomi’s 2%, still far behind Huawei’s 9% in third place.
It’s clear that while AI phones are helping Vivo’s high-end efforts, the effect seems insufficient. Why? There might be several reasons:
- Vivo’s core technology reserves are not enough. Vivo’s past success was based on product definition and channel layout. But in the AI smartphone era, brands need to compete on one thing: technology.
The quality of AI technology is particularly noticeable in user experience. For instance, the “suicide” suggestion from Vivo’s smartwatch contrasts sharply with the “normal answers” provided by Huawei and Apple smartwatches, as shared by many netizens in related topic comment sections.
It’s worth noting that industry insiders have previously revealed that Vivo’s large model is based on an improved version of Zhipu AI’s base model. If true, doesn’t this contradict Vivo’s claim of a “self-developed” large model?
Of course, even if Vivo can’t develop its own large model, it’s not shameful. After all, doesn’t Apple use ChatGPT? So to some extent, Vivo could continue its past approach of buying and using what works well.
- Vivo’s content ecosystem is not strong enough.
Besides technology, why is Vivo’s high-end market share lower than Xiaomi’s and Huawei’s? One obvious shortcoming is that Vivo lacks sufficient ecosystem support. This makes it difficult to provide consumers with richer experiences through software services, smart home devices, cloud computing, and other aspects.
Long ago, industry giants like Apple, Xiaomi, and Huawei recognized the importance of ecosystems. They not only improved their smartphone product lines but also extended into laptops, smart TVs, wearable devices, and other fields, initially building a smart hardware and software ecosystem with strong competitive barriers.
This ecological advantage continues into the AI era. On one hand, it allows brand large models to become better and more refined through interaction data with more users. This might also be a major reason for Vivo’s smartwatch “mishap” this time.
On the other hand, the emergence of AI large models has made it more possible for full intelligent interconnection centered on smartphones, thus meeting the intelligent needs of more high-end user groups in advance.
In comparison, although Vivo’s product line covers smartphones, tablets, and peripheral accessory products, its overall ecosystem is not well-developed and relatively limited in scale. This makes Vivo seem somewhat powerless when facing the ecological dimensional reduction attacks from Apple and Huawei.
Consequently, consumers naturally become skeptical of Vivo’s products when buying high-end products, making it difficult for them to wholeheartedly pay for Vivo’s offerings.
Will Vivo’s focus on imaging be defeated by AI?
Recently, media reported that Li Jingwen, Vivo’s vice president of marketing and sales for China, had resigned for personal reasons.
This news quickly attracted widespread attention in the industry. The reason is simple: Vivo China’s senior management has indeed changed quite frequently in recent years.
For example, according to Tianyancha APP, the position of president of Vivo China has changed four times in five years, including Liu Hong, Ni Xudong, and Ding Yi, until last November when Cheng Gang took over, also serving as the global market president of iQOO. Only then did Vivo’s internal management seem to show signs of stability.
The frequent changes in senior management undoubtedly reveal from the side: Vivo is currently facing enormous competitive pressure.
In the past, although Vivo’s performance in underlying systems and self-developed chips was indeed average, thanks to its deep insight into user needs, Vivo wasn’t actually left too far behind in the market. On the contrary, after shifting its R&D focus to areas such as imaging chips, smartphone imaging has now become one of Vivo’s important product trump cards.
For example, Vivo’s Blue Print imaging system, composed of self-developed Blue Print sensing technology, self-developed Blue Print algorithm matrix, and self-developed Blue Print imaging chip, has indeed brought many users new shooting experiences.
But now, after entering the AI era and the Sora era, will Vivo’s painstakingly built imaging advantages still be so obvious?
It’s worth noting that no matter how advanced smartphone imaging becomes, users can still only take pictures and make limited modifications to images.
But now, with the addition of AI large model capabilities, users can not only gain the ability to modify images without barriers but also combine shooting content with AIGC content to innovate more AI imaging applications, truly breaking the boundaries of smartphone imaging.
In this regard, the Xiaomi 14 Ultra released earlier this year has already tried to combine AI and imaging capabilities, allowing AI to intervene in the early shooting process. According to reports, in long-focus shooting scenarios where phones were previously limited by hardware capabilities and unable to handle excessive zoom levels, Xiaomi directly used AIGC technology to redraw the image, instantly making distant objects clear instead of pixelated.
Obviously, using software algorithms and even AI to compensate for hardware limitations is becoming a major development direction in the smartphone imaging world. This seems to greatly reduce the imaging advantage barrier that Vivo has accumulated in the past.
Of course, Vivo still has a chance to catch up, and the key still lies in AI.
Because users do have a demand for AI, but this demand is based on real AI, not just “AI hype.”
The current situation is that although the AI industry is exceptionally hot, various large model AI applications on both PC and mobile platforms still suffer from hallucination problems where they confidently state incorrect information. This has caused many people to lose interest after initial trials.
Moreover, although current AI phones have many functions such as AI calls and AI drawing, feedback from many users suggests that the actual experience is quite average. Some users even believe that many smartphone AI functions existed before the explosion of large models, and now phone manufacturers are just repackaging them with an AI shell.
Therefore, in the long run, even if Vivo “stumbles” in this round of AI fever, if it can continue to increase investment in AI technology, Vivo may achieve a miracle reversal as a latecomer in the future era of true AI smartphones.