OnePlus has always marched to the beat of its own drummer — for better or for worse. Take, for example, the company’s latest foray into mobile AI, the AI Eraser. Before you ask, no, this isn’t just a revamped version of Google’s long-running and very good Magic Eraser.
No, OnePlus went ahead and built its own version in an attempt to show the world that it has its own AI ambitions. It’s possible that the Oppo-owned company has been working on AI Eraser for some time now — although the world has known about Google’s version since the Pixel 6 event in March 2021 (Magic Editor, meanwhile, debuted a year ago at I/O 2023 ).
From the sound of its press hardware, the company went ahead and built this thing on the cutting edge, starting with its own big first-party tongue models.
“AI Eraser is the result of a significant R&D investment by OnePlus,” notes the company in its press material. “The proprietary LLM behind the new feature has been trained on a massive dataset that allows it to understand complex scenes. Through this advanced visual understanding, AI Eraser is able to intelligently replace unwanted objects with contextually appropriate elements that naturally enhance a photo’s appeal, enabling users to make high-quality photo edits anywhere, anytime.” .
An AI eraser is an undeniably handy feature, but it’s also one that Google knocked right out of the park. It’s probably not the best use of one’s R&D resources to go head-on with this feature — especially a feature that’s currently available on iOS and Android devices through Google Photos.
More than anything else, this seems to be OnePlus’ attempt to plant its flag in what’s very much shaping up to be the year of the smartphone. Hopefully next time, he’ll use those resources to create something that really differentiates himself from the existing properties.
The AI will roll out to OnePlus devices this month, starting with the OnePlus 12, OnePlus 12R, OnePlus 11, OnePlus Open and OnePlus Nord CE 4. However, it won’t roll out on R12-D12.
