[johndough]

The problem is not AI - many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all. The problem is that hardware vendors do not provide access to their signal processing chip's internals. It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.

[michaelt]

> many of the best "AI" publications are open source after all.

In my experience there's also very little detailed documentation about what cutting-edge phone cameras are doing.

You can get some vague descriptions (focus stacking? exposure stacking? ISO stacking? ML bokeh? Special handling of faces in multiracial groups? Shake compensation? Super-resolution?) which is all very well shooting from a tripod - yet modern phone cameras do their magic at 4k 60fps even while moving? All while running on battery?

[colejohnson66]

> It is damn near impossible to even make a phone call these days without some obscure binary blob or magic chips that nobody knows what they do but are able to control every aspect of a phone.

That’s always been the case for wireless phones; It’s nothing new. Your SIM card is running literal Java programs (hence where the “3 billion Java devices”) and can ask the baseband to send data for it with you having no way to know. Here’s one researcher’s diggings into it: [0] and the discussion: [1].

Some baseband processors can even DMA the main memory. IIRC, Apple has put in effort to firewall said processors.

[0]: https://scribe.rip/telecom-expert/what-is-at-t-doing-at-1111...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29135559

[hoseja]

It's the only way the government lets the plebs carry around radio transceivers in their pockets.

[kaba0]

(Just a nit, it is actually 56 billion now)

[megous]

Some do. Pinephone Pro's ISP has some public docs and mainline Linux support.