A recent developer broadcast revealed that the Google Pixel 8 will not have access to the Gemini Nano, despite it being a feature of the Pixel 8 Pro.

Google recently released the latest episode of #TheAndroidShow, a quarterly recap of new and upcoming projects. In this episode, Terence Zhang, Developer Relations Engineer at Google, stated that the Gemini Nano is not available on the Google Pixel 8 due to certain hardware limitations.

The Gemini Nano is a lightweight version of Google's recently announced Gemini AI; it does not have access to all the features of the Gemini Pro or the upcoming Gemini Ultra, but as Zhang continued in the Q&A part of the video, users several advantages.

One such advantage of the Gemini Nano is privacy. All inference is done locally on the device, so data is not leaked by cloud-based problems. Also, since there are no round trips to the server, the latency between the request and the data being displayed is greatly reduced.

Another advantage is that by running on the device, Google Nano is a free service; Zhang said that running AI costs on the cloud is much more expensive than many people think, and companies like Samsung are planning to charge for more advanced AI features of AI, which explains why the company plans to charge for it. However, removing this connection to the cloud would limit AI's capabilities.

The biggest weakness of Google Nano, however, is that it relies on the device's own capabilities to function. Therefore, it cannot be used on the Pixel 8. This limitation also means that the Gemini Nano will always lag behind the more powerful Pro and Ultra options, which can retrieve data from an external server.

Currently, it is not known which hardware limitations prevent the Gemini Nano from functioning on the Google Pixel 8. However, while the Pixel 8 may not have Nano, AI magic like Best Take photos and Magic Editor generative photo editing are already possible. In addition, several new AI features have just been added that are worth checking out, including the "Circle to Search" feature first introduced in the Galaxy S24 series.