Big AI Models for 6G Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges, and Research Directions

Recently, big artificial intelligence (AI) models represented by chatGPT have brought an incredible revolution. With the pre-trained big AI model (BAIM) in certain fields, numerous downstream tasks can be accomplished with only few-shot or even zero-shot learning and exhibit state-of-the-art performances. As widely envisioned, the big AI models are to rapidly penetrate into major intelligent services and applications, and are able to run at low unit cost and high flexibility. In 6G wireless networks, to fully enable intelligent communication, sensing and computing, apart from providing other intelligent wireless services and applications, it is of vital importance to design and deploy certain wireless BAIMs (wBAIMs). However, there still lacks investigation on architecture design and system evaluation for wBAIM. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive discussion as well as some in-depth prospects on the demand, design and deployment aspects of the wBAIM. We opine that wBAIM will be a recipe of the 6G wireless networks to build high-efficient, sustainable, versatile, and extensible wireless intelligence for numerous promising visions. Then, we present the core characteristics and principles to guide the design of wBAIMs, and discuss the key aspects of developing wBAIMs through identifying the differences between the existing BAIMs and the emerging wBAIMs. Finally, related research directions and potential solutions are outlined.