A Chinese company you may have never heard of has announced that it’s manufacturing smartphones, or at least sourcing them from ODMs. But wait, this is no ordinary smartphone. the The world’s first AI agent phone. And lo and behold, this product is being promoted before OpenAI has had a chance to promote its own rumored smartphone.
The company in question is called StepFun, and it was founded in 2023 by former Microsoft employees in Shanghai, and the phone they’re teasing today is step x neo. StepFun is no stranger to on-device AI, having previously provided service integrations for manufacturers like Oppo and Geely.
I don’t know if the StepX fitness platform is somehow related to this business, but if it isn’t, it’s pretty funny that StepFun couldn’t even be bothered to Google the name they wanted to use. Or maybe they wanted to look like SpaceX so much that they didn’t care about the fact that there was something completely different called StepX.
The phone runs Step AOS and is powered by Step Amoo, a “personal intelligent agent.” Amoo is something you talk to, and like any other AI chatbot, it speaks to you in natural language. The OS is said to create a “native runtime environment” for “intelligent agents” by focusing on “the three main bottlenecks for AI agents: memory, decision-making, and execution.” It is said that memory acquisition by the agent takes “only” 15 milliseconds. The agent is also said to have excellent offline autonomous execution capabilities.
However, the included AI operations are not entirely on-device. You can also access the cloud to perform complex tasks while ensuring your personal data never leaves your phone.
The company’s on-device LLM is called Step Edge, and it claims to rank #1 among similar models in 29 trusted benchmarks, but it won’t say which benchmarks or which models it’s compared to.
At this point, it’s not clear whether Step AOS is actually more than a skin on Android. We suspect it, but we don’t know yet. StepFun says it’s a combination of Android, Linux, and RTOS, but that doesn’t really tell us much.
The phone has a dot-matrix LED display on the back reminiscent of the Nothing phone, but no specs have been revealed so far.
However, StepFun announced its first partners for the device, including a number of Chinese apps and services such as Meituan, Alipay, Amap, Baidu, Didi, and Ctrip. And that’s all we know so far about this hype-building “announcement” that was mostly buzzwords with no substance.
Perhaps this will become a real product someday. Perhaps it will be impressive for an “agency call”, whatever that means. But for now, it looks like a small Chinese AI company is trying desperately to divert attention from the big players, trying to claim it was the world’s first to “launch” a smartphone, even though it didn’t. Not yet, anyway.
Source 1 (Chinese) | Source 2 (Chinese) | Source 3
