Here's the next Android manufacturer to offer Gemini Nano on its phones

Your favorite AI chatbot relies on a large language model (LLM) that is far too large to run on your smartphone, but that doesn’t mean your phone can’t run a LLM at all. In fact, there are versions of popular LLMs that have been trimmed down so much that they can run locally on mobile devices, with the trade-off being they’re more limited in their complexity. Gemini Nano, for example, is the mobile-optimized version of the Google Gemini LLM, and it can be found on a handful of phones from Google, Samsung, and Xiaomi. Now, Gemini Nano is coming to phones from Motorola.

When I shared the news last week that Gemini Nano is coming to the Xiaomi 14T, one of my followers on X who goes by the username Nhyphk reached out to me to tell me that his Motorola phone also received the AI model. After a bit of back and forth, I was able to confirm that Gemini Nano is indeed rolling out to his Motorola phone, the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra.

His Motorola Edge 50 Ultra received an update to the AICore app from Google Play that brought it to version 0.release.qc8635.670632439. AICore is the system app that’s responsible for downloading the Gemini Nano model and providing an API that apps can call to use it. After he downloaded the AICore update, he opened the Google Messages app and tapped the Magic Compose button, which prompted AICore to download the approximately 1.25GB Gemini Nano model. The “about” screen for Magic Compose then confirmed the feature was running on-device.

Magic Compose, if you aren’t aware, is a feature in the Google Messages app that suggests canned responses that you can send to your contacts. It analyzes the last 20 messages in a conversation to generate suggested replies. To protect your privacy, those messages are analyzed on-device using Gemini Nano.

Beyond Magic Compose, there aren’t any other features on the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra we know of that rely on Gemini Nano — at least not yet. Google promised developers it would release an API that lets them use Gemini Nano in their apps, but that API is still in private preview. Companies like Adobe plan to use Gemini Nano to provide on-device document summaries, but it hasn’t released that feature yet.

In any case, with the addition of the Motorola Edge 50 Ultra, there are now a total of 14 premium Android phones that support the Gemini Nano AI model. The Google Pixel 8 series, Samsung Galaxy S24 series, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6, Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 6, and Xiaomi 14T Pro are all confirmed to support Gemini Nano 1.0, whereas the entirety of the Google Pixel 9 series supports the newer Gemini Nano with multimodality model.

It’s unclear if the regular Xiaomi 14T will actually get Gemini Nano support, or if only the Pro model will, but what is clear is that Google is getting serious about bringing its on-device LLM to more devices. Hopefully it follows suit by rolling out more features that actually take advantage of it, so the ~1.25GB download doesn’t feel like a waste of space.