Google Confirms Gemini Nano is Not Coming to Pixel 8

When Google announced its Gemini LLMs in early December, it noted that Gemini Nano would soon come to Pixel 8 Pro, and the December Pixel Feature Drop was the first to include features—Summarize in Recorder and Smart Reply in Gboard—that utilized this on-board, hardware-accelerated AI functionality. But what about the (non-Pro) Pixel 8? After all, the two phones are largely identical internally.

“Gemini Nano will not be coming to Pixel 8 because of some hardware limitations,” Google’s Terence Zhang said in response to a viewer question on the most recent episode of The Android Show podcast. “We’re working to bring Nano to more devices. It’s currently on the Pixel 8 Pro and very recently available on the Samsung S24 family. [And] yeah, it’ll be coming to more high-end devices in the near future. But unfortunately not the Pixel 8.”

So that’s interesting. Google currently offers two Pixel 8 series phones, and Gemini Nano is only available on one of them. But Samsung sells three Galaxy S24 series phones, and Gemini Nano is available on all of them. So perhaps comparing the two families of phones will provide a clue as to what hardware limitation(s) could prevent Gemini Nano from working on Pixel 8.

I’m coming up short. The Pixel 8 only has 8 GB of RAM, compared to 12 GB for the Pixel 8 Pro. But the Samsung Galaxy S24 also only has 8 GB of RAM, where the S24+ and S24 Ultra both have 12 GB. The Pixel 8 and 8 Pro both have Google Tensor 3 processors, where the S24 family devices all share the same Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor. And it can’t be storage: Though the Pixels both use UFS 3.1 storage and the S24s all use UFS 4 storage.

Interestingly, the Galaxy S24 series all support Gemini Pro as well, and not just the smaller Gemini Nano like the Pixel 8 Pro. This should be troubling to anyone who bought into Pixel for the AI prowess of its Tensor processors: Apparently, the Snapdragon chipset in the Galaxy phones is even more powerful in this regard.

And while I’m unclear on how this is possible, Google also notes that “Samsung will be one of the first partners to test Gemini Ultra, our largest model for highly complex tasks, before it is available broadly to developers and enterprise customers later this year.” Will Gemini Ultra somehow run on the Galaxy S24 series?