OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer, for better or worse. Take, for example, the company's latest foray into mobile artificial intelligence, AI Eraser. Before you ask, this is not just a rebadged version of the very good Magic Eraser that Google has offered for years.
No, OnePlus built its own version to show the world that it has its own AI ambitions. The Oppo-owned company has presumably been working on AI Eraser for some time, but the world has only known about Google's version since the Pixel 6 event in March 2021 (while Magic Editor debuted a year ago at I/O 2023).
From what press material sounds like, the company built this from the ground up, starting with its own first-party large-scale language model.
“AI Eraser is the result of significant R&D investment from OnePlus,” the company said in a press statement. “The unique LLM behind the new feature is trained on massive datasets to enable it to understand complex scenes. Through this advanced visual understanding, AI Eraser brings unwanted objects into context. It can intelligently replace appropriate elements according to your needs, naturally enhancing the appeal of your photos and enabling users to make high-quality photo editing anytime, anywhere.”
The AI-powered eraser is definitely a useful feature, but it's also one that Google quickly eliminated. Perhaps tackling that feature head-on, especially the one currently available on iOS and Android devices via Google Photos, isn't the best use of R&D resources.
More than anything, this appears to be OnePlus' attempt to plant its flag in what is expected to be the year of smartphones. I hope that next time they will leverage those resources to build something that truly differentiates them from existing properties.
AI will roll out to OnePlus devices this month starting with OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open, and OnePlus Nord CE 4. However, AI R12-D12.