StepFun Startup Prepares AI Agent Mobile, AI Competition Enters the Palm of Your Hand

JAKARTA - The competition for artificial intelligence is starting to move from data centers to the mobile phones we use every day. StepFun, a Chinese AI unicorn, is said to be preparing its first agenttic AI smart phone.

Yicai Global, quoted on Friday, July 10, reported that the information came from a number of sources in the mobile supply chain. StepFun has also just received funding from several companies in the consumer electronics industry chain.

AI agentic refers to an AI system that not only responds to commands, but can also help carry out certain tasks more independently. In mobile phones, this concept can mean AI helping to organize applications, read context, search for information, to carry out actions according to user commands.

StepFun has the official name of Jieyue Xingchen Intelligent Technology. The Shanghai-based company is known as one of the aggressive new AI players in China.

Two years ago, StepFun became the first Chinese company to release a large-scale language model with one trillion parameters. Parameters are the size of components in an AI model that help a system understand patterns, language, images, or user commands.

Earlier this year, StepFun received an investment from Huaqin Technology in a Series B+ funding round. Huaqin is known as one of the world's largest original design manufacturers or ODM.

ODM is a company that designs and manufactures devices for other brands. In the mobile industry, the role of ODM is important because they can speed up the production of new devices without all the work starting from scratch.

A number of other companies in the consumer electronics supply chain have also joined StepFun. These include Longcheer Technology, OmniVision Integrated Circuits Group, and ZTE.

With that support, StepFun's investors now cover various parts of the industry, ranging from mobile phone design and manufacturing, mobile camera technology, to consumer brands.

StepFun was founded in 2023 by Jiang Daxin, a former Microsoft executive. The company focuses on multimodal base models, reasoning engines, and AI agents.

A multimodal model is an AI that can understand more than one type of data, such as text, images, voice, or video. While an AI agent is a system designed to help complete a task, not just provide answers.

"Although the exploration of large language models on devices is already very extensive, the category of smart phones is still waiting for regulatory permission," a source at one of China's mobile phone manufacturers told Yicai.

However, the source said the technical obstacles were not too big.

"From a technical perspective, only a few major obstacles remain," he said.

Other AI phone development is also moving fast. One of them is the Doubao AI phone, an experimental agent device resulting from a collaboration between ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, and hardware manufacturer ZTE.

This change indicates a new direction for AI competition. Companies are no longer just competing to make big models in the cloud. They are starting to chase the place closest to the user, namely the mobile phone.

A number of mobile phone manufacturers are also starting to place AI agents as the core of the next generation operating system. Honor has introduced its vision for Agentic OS. Google is also emphasizing changes to the Android experience by placing AI agents as an important part.

Therefore, mobile operating systems are beginning to become an important arena in the global AI competition.

Yicai Global said Chinese AI developers have their own advantages. They can take advantage of China's mature manufacturing ecosystem to test new products faster and market them through existing distribution channels.

For developers of large language models, mobile also gives them more stable access to users. They don't just rely on APIs or app distributions.

APIs are technical pathways that allow one software service to connect with another. However, if AI goes directly into the device, companies can get closer to the user's daily habits.

Industry experts assess that the next AI device competition is not enough to put an AI assistant on a mobile phone. The challenge lies in the redesign of the operating system and the way users interact with AI agents.

In other words, AI phones are not just ordinary phones that are given chatbots. The competition will spread to operating systems, applications, user data, and AI services that work behind the scenes.