A Chinese company you may never have heard of recently announced it’s making a smartphone – or at least sourcing one from an ODM. But wait, this is no regular smartphone; Its World’s first AI agentic phone. And guess what, before OpenAI even gets a chance to publicize its own rumored smartphone, it’s being hyped.
The company in question is called StepFun – it was founded by former Microsoft employees in Shanghai in 2023, and the phone they’re teasing today is called stepx neo. Stepfun is no stranger to on-device AI, but they have so far provided service integrations to manufacturers like Oppo and Geely.
We’re not sure if the StepX fitness platform is related to this venture in any way, but if it’s not, it’s quite funny how StepFun couldn’t even bother Google about the name it wants to use. Or maybe he wanted it to resemble SpaceX so much that he didn’t care about the fact that there’s a completely different thing out there also called StepX.
The phone runs Step AOS and has Step Amu, a “personal intelligent agent”. Amu is something you talk to, and it’s the same as any other AI chatbot – you talk to it in natural language. The OS reportedly creates a “native runtime environment” for “intelligent agents”, focusing on “the three key constraints of AI agents: memory, decision making, and execution”. Memory retrieval by the agent is said to take “at least” 15ms. The agent is also reportedly excelling in offline autonomous execution capabilities.
However, AI operations on board are not entirely on-device; They also have access to the cloud for complex tasks, as well, ensuring that no personal data leaves the phone.
The company’s on-device LLM is called Step Edge, and it claims it ranked first among similar models in 29 official benchmarks, but did not say which benchmarks these were and which models it was being compared against.
At this point, it’s unclear whether Step AOS is actually anything more than a skin on top of Android – we suspect it, but we don’t know yet. Stepfan says it’s a combination of Android, Linux, and RTOS, but that doesn’t give us much to go on.
The phone has a dot matrix LED display on the back that is reminiscent of the Nothing phone, and so far, exactly zero specs have been revealed.
However, StepFun has announced the first batch of partners for the device, which includes a number of Chinese apps and services such as Meituan, Alipay, Amap, Baidu, Didi, Ctrip, and more. And that’s all we know so far about this hyped-up “announcement,” which was mostly of little substance.
Maybe this will turn into a real product one day; Perhaps it would also be impressive to have an “agent phone”, whatever that means. But for now, it seems like a small Chinese AI company is desperately trying to steal some attention from the big players, and to claim that it was the first in the world to “launch” a smartphone, even though it did no such thing. Not yet anyway.