Smartphone giants like Samsung are going to talk up 'AI phones' this year — here's what that means

Artificial intelligence phones: these are the buzzwords you'll likely hear this year, as smartphone players look to jump on the AI hype to boost sales of their devices after a difficult stretch of time.

OpenAI's ChatGPT, released in late 2022, sparked huge interest in generative AI, specifically — models trained on huge amounts of data that are able to produce text, images and prompts from user videos. Since then, AI excitement has touched every industry and entered the popular imagination.

Smartphone makers see a chance to cash in and are going to be touting the tech at the Mobile World Congress (MWC), the biggest mobile industry trade show in the world, which kicks off on Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

"Nobody wants to be seen as being behind the curve, and AI is just the talk of the town. It is the buzzword this year that all the vendors are going to be jumping on," Bryan Ma, vice president of client devices research at IDC, told CNBC.

The gear is harder to define, and it depends on which manufacturer you ask.

Analysts who spoke to CNBC broadly agree on a few things — that these devices will have more advanced chips to run AI applications, and that those AI apps will run on-device rather than in the cloud.

Companies like Qualcomm and MediaTek have launched smartphone chipsets that enable the processing power required for AI applications.

But AI tech inside phones is not new. Some aspects of AI have been in devices for years and have allowed features such as background blur effects on smartphones and picture editing.

What is new is the introduction of large language models and generative AI. Large language models are huge AI models trained on vast amounts of data that underpin applications like the widely popular chatbots. These