Samsung has been trying to make Bixby a thing for about eight years now, with no success at all; Alexa and Siri may be household names, but Bixby has long been considered a joke at best. That doesn't seem to stop Samsung from trying to elevate its assistant to the big leagues with AI.

We've long heard rumors that Samsung may be preparing a substantial AI upgrade for Bixby, and a new report from ET News suggests that the first AI upgrade could appear with the Samsung Galaxy S25 early next year. According to the report.

Apparently Samsung is preparing Large Language Model (LLM) support for Bixby, which has already been released without fanfare on the Galaxy Tab S10 in China. The company also claims that this upgrade was originally intended for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Z Flip 6, but scheduling issues forced a delay.

ET News claims that Bixby's LLM will be powered by Samsung's Gauss model alongside the Google Gemini. On the other hand, the Chinese model is supposed to be using the Chinese LLM and Gauss - i.e., the two may have very different usage experiences.

The addition of LLM support should make Bixby more powerful, making the assistant more conversational and able to provide better answers. Other features might include things like image generation, which has been a staple feature of chatbots and other AI software for the past year; the fact that LLM will reportedly leverage Google Gemini might give us an idea of what to expect.

Whether that will actually get people interested in Bixby is another matter. Even when Samsung has been pushing Bixby hard over the years, it has not been very successful in getting users to treat Bixby as anything more than bloatware. Given that there are already so many popular competitors in the AI market, including the Samsung-compatible Google Gemini, this is hardly an easy task.

Still, leaker Ice Universe believes the new Bixby will be the Galaxy S25's “biggest selling point,” and we'll have to wait and see what actually happens once the Galaxy S25 launch event actually takes place. The next Galaxy Unpacked is expected to take place on January 23, where we will see the first official look at the Galaxy S25 and the final version of One UI 7 (which Samsung has incorporated into Android 15).