The race to bring artificial intelligence everywhere is taking a detour through the good old laptop computer.
Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new type of computer designed for artificial intelligence. Microsoft says the machine will run AI systems on chips and other equipment inside the computer, making it faster, more personal, and more private.
A new computer called Copilot+ PC uses AI to help people easily find the documents and files they've worked on, the emails they've read, and the websites they've visited. The company's AI system also automates tasks like photo editing and language translation.
The new design will be featured on Microsoft's Surface laptops and other high-end products running the Windows operating system from the world's largest PC manufacturers: Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung.
Industry analysts believe that AI PCs have the potential to reverse years of decline in the importance of personal computers. Over the past two decades, the demand for the fastest laptops has decreased as so much software has moved to cloud computing centers. All most people needed was a strong internet connection and their web browser.
But AI extends that long-distance relationship to its limits. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools run in data centers packed with expensive, sophisticated chips that can handle large, cutting-edge systems. Even the most advanced chatbots take time to receive a query, process it, and return a response. It is also very expensive to manage.
Microsoft wants to run AI systems directly on personal computers, eliminating that lag and reducing prices. Microsoft has been shrinking the size of its AI systems, called models, to make them easier to run outside of data centers. More than 40 will run directly on your laptop. Smaller models are generally not as powerful or accurate as state-of-the-art AI systems, but they are improved enough to be useful to the average consumer.
“We are entering a new era in which computers will not only understand us, but will be able to predict our desires and intentions,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It's coming in,” he said.
Analysts say Apple will follow suit at next month's software developer conference, announcing an overhaul of its virtual assistant Siri and an overall strategy to further integrate AI capabilities into laptops and iPhones. Expect.
The adoption of AI PCs will depend on companies' ability to create compelling reasons for buyers to upgrade. Lin Huang, an IDC analyst who closely tracks the market, said these new computers will cost more than $1,000 and initial sales will be small. But by the end of the decade, he predicted, assuming AI tools prove useful, they will become “ubiquitous.” “Everything will become an AI PC.”
The computer industry is looking for shock. Consumers are upgrading their computers less frequently, as the music and photos they once stored on their machines are now often stored online in places like Spotify, Netflix, and iCloud. Computer purchases by businesses, schools and other institutions boomed during the pandemic, then crashed before finally stabilizing.
Some high-end smartphones already include AI chips, but sales are slowing because the features are “not sophisticated enough to facilitate faster upgrade cycles,” said a Susquehanna International Group analyst. List, Mehdi Hosseini said in a research note. . He said it will be at least another year before meaningful breakthroughs become noticeable to consumers.
At this event, Microsoft showcased a new laptop with photo memory. Users can ask his Copilot, Microsoft's chatbot, to search for files by typing questions using natural language using a feature called Recall. “Can you catch me on a video call with Joe recently and he said 'me'? Do you like New York coffee mugs?” ” The AI system is constantly scanning what you do on your laptop, so your computer can quickly retrieve files containing these details.
“It remembers things I forget,” Matt Barlow, Microsoft's head of marketing for Surface computers, said in an interview.
Microsoft says the information used for this recall feature is stored directly on your laptop to protect your privacy and is not sent back to its servers or used to train future AI systems. Ta. Pavan Davuluri, the Microsoft executive who oversees Windows, said the Recall system also allows users to opt out of sharing certain types of information, such as visits to certain websites, but not financial or personal information. He said some sensitive data, such as, will not be shared. Browsing sessions are not monitored by default.
Microsoft also demonstrated live transcripts that translate in real time, and said they can be used with any video streamed across a laptop screen.
Last month, Microsoft released an AI model small enough to run on smartphones, which it said performed nearly as well as GPT-3.5. GPT-3.5 is the much larger system that originally powered OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot, which debuted in late 2022.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems.)
Chipmakers are also making advances such as adjusting laptop battery life to enable the massive number of calculations that AI demands. The new computers are equipped with specialized chips developed by Qualcomm, the largest smartphone chip provider.
A new type of chip in AI computers, known as a neural processing unit, is specialized in processing complex AI tasks such as generating images and summarizing documents, but its benefits may not yet be noticed by consumers. Professor and researcher Subbarao Kambanpati said. He received his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Arizona State University.
He added that it remains important that people have access to fast internet connections, as most of the data processing for AI still needs to be done on company servers rather than directly on the device.
But neural processing chips also speed up other tasks, such as video editing and the ability to use virtual backgrounds within video calls, says Brad Linder, editor of Liliputing, a blog that has covered computers for nearly 20 years. he said. So even if people don't buy into the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, there could be other reasons he ends up getting an AI computer.
