Disrupt 2026: OpenAI, Anthropic, Replit, and more take over 6 industry stages. 25% off tickets now
Disrupt ticket savings of up to $200 + 50% off a second ends Sept 25, 11:59 p.m. PT. REGISTER HERE.
PrismML brings its tiny LLMs to Qualcomm-powered smart glasses
The AI Lab PrismML — founded by Caltech researchers and advised by UC Berkeley’s Ion Stoica — has created a version of its tiny language models for smart glasses running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips.
On Wednesday, at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit, the chipmaker showcased PrismML’s 1-bit Bonsai LLM, which can be run locally on AI smart glasses built on the Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 Platform.
As TechCrunch previously reported, PrismML’s claim to fame is that it shrinks larger models substantially (in this case, by 4x), while retaining almost all of their performance on standard benchmarks. The smart glasses version is a 2-billion-parameter model tuned for vision and language, so wearers can ask what they’re looking at in real time.
Prism’s larger goal is open-weight AI that runs on devices and makes better use of the computing power they already have. The startup pitches this as an alternative to depending on the privacy promises of proprietary AI labs and their insatiable need for more compute.
Releasing a model for Qualcomm’s chip is a step toward that vision. But no smart glasses running PrismML have been announced yet.
Your next big connection is at Disrupt. Connect with 10,000+ founders, VCs, operators, and tech leaders. Explore tomorrow’s breakthroughs, hear what’s shaping tech today, and save up to $200 by Sept. 25 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
Newsletters
Subscribe for the industry’s biggest tech news
Related
AI Anthropic says its biology lab has already found something big Julie Bort
Latest in AI
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Bring your co-founder, partner, or colleague and get 50% off a second TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 pass TechCrunch Events
In Brief PrismML brings its tiny LLMs to Qualcomm-powered smart glasses Julie Bort
AI Oracle sends force majeure notice on its New Mexico Stargate data center Aditya Mehta