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oPro have been struggling for quite a few years now, thanks to some terrible business decisions (remember their drone that had a habit of dropping out of the sky), lack of innovation and massively increased competition from those busy industrial units in Shenzen.
Since DJI and Insta360 entered the action cam market, GoPro have largely stuck to their guns, just rolling out mildly enhanced iterations of their tried-and-tested Hero camera. Yes, they released their own 360 camera, but it hardly set the world alight and Insta continue to dominate that particular niche.
But it’s still a bit of a surprise that, instead of improving their sensors, frame rate, bit rate, battery capacity, build quality, microphones or lenses – they’ve instead decided to embrace AI.
Yes friends, today GoPro announced a brand new custom imaging system on a chip – called GP3 which includes a built-in Neural Processor Unit (NPU) designed for AI‑driven video pixel processing.
They reckon that this brand new chip, built using a 5-nanometer process delivers twice the processing power of their old GP2 chip which (they say) offers greatly improved low-light capabilities and image quality.
The big question though is what they mean when they say the chip delivers a “superior AI‑driven image”. Does this mean that the entire frame is being faked on the fly by the camera or is it simply an ‘enhancement’ to the footage that uses machine learning to reduce sensor noise and artificially boost ambient light levels?
According to the marketing material, the new chip has dedicated cores for scene recognition and subject detection that adjust camera settings in real time, so perhaps it is simply an enhancement and there’s no generative element to the process.
In addition to the AI enhanced imaging, the new chip is claimed to be a lot more power efficient (thanks to that 5 nanometer process) and have improved thermal performance. Action cams are well known for overheating and shutting down after extended use, so this could be big selling point if, as GoPro claim, their new camera will “significantly outperform the competition” and provide “industry‑leading runtimes”. They’re also promising higher resolutions and frame-rates.
There’s no sign of the camera that this new chip will be built with, but they’re saying it will be out in ‘Q2’ of 2026, so we won’t have to wait too long to see if the hype matches the real world performance.
Also published in RAW & Unfiltered on Substack.
