Google quietly launches genius new app

AI is the future, right? Well, that means that the future is already here.

About two-thirds of the planet’s population uses AI every day, according to a KPMG global study. What’s more, 83% believe using AI offers a wide range of benefits.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently said everyone will want their own personal robot and that they could help productivity soar and ignite a “universal high income,” pushing automated production and distribution to the level where basic needs are easily accessible.

You may appreciate Musk’s point of view, or you may raise some ethical and philosophical questions about what people would transform into surrounded by so much comfort. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, because we are already far down the road to AI wonderworld.

AI has countless benefits, there’s no doubt about it. The first that comes to mind is its usage in the healthcare sector, with 90% of hospitals already using AI for diagnosis and monitoring. But there’s so much more, and that’s why AI is becoming a focus for many tech companies.

Recently, the tech giant Google (GOOGL) quietly launched a genius app, enabling users more convenient usage of AI models.

Google has launched a new app that will make AI fans happy.

Image source: Shutterstock

Google drops an app allowing users to download and use AI models offline

Google released an app that enables users to run various openly available AI models from the AI dev platform Hugging Face on their phones. It also gives you access to Google’s popular and powerful Gemma 3n AI model.

Currently, the app, Google AI Edge Gallery, is available only for Android users, but will soon reach iOS. So where to find it? It’s not yet available on Play Store, but it can be downloaded from GitHub. This is Google’s experimental release.

It needs to be installed through an APK file, which requires changing the setting on an Android device to allow the installation of unknown apps. Further, you need to have an account with Hugging Face to download the LLM version that will run locally, writes ZD Net.

It sounds like a little bit of a hassle, but having AI models on your phone that run without internet or in airplane mode, seems worth it.

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“Dive into a world of creative and practical AI use cases, all running locally, without needing an internet connection once the model is loaded. Experiment with different models, chat, ask questions with images, explore prompts, and more,” reads the description on GitHub.

This genius new app provides a “Prompt Lab” enabling users to run “single-turn” tasks such as summarizing or rewriting articles. It also offers several task templates and configurable settings to adjust performance, writes TechCrunch.

Would you buy a more powerful phone for this app?

Logically, once installed, an AI model will use your device’s processing power to function and answer your requests.

Running AI models locally requires a powerful CPU and GPU, and you may wonder if your phone will overheat and destroy your battery life using one of these models.

Thankfully, the app lets you keep track of your device’s temperature and even lets you decide which chip the AI will use. You can switch processing between the CPU and GPU to improve performance.

This means Google AI Edge Gallery requires a premium phone or tablet, something like the Galaxy S25 Ultra or the upcoming iPhone 17 Pro Max. These have more powerful chips and batteries, enabling AI models to run for longer periods of time, writes BGR.

“Even my 2019 One Plus 7 Pro can run the models at usable speeds, without bad power draw or heating. I suspect because its OS is relatively light and it's got 8GB of memory. It's not even using the GPU or NPU to accelerate on it yet,” one user wrote on a Reddit thread discussing the new app.

As might be expected with an experimental model, the app has been reported to crash from time to time, and it also does not provide accurate answers every single time. However, with Google’s further upgrades, it could be one of the go-to apps for when you need AI help offline.