Microsoft CEO Satya Narayana Nadella speaks at a Microsoft Live event in Manhattan, New York City, October 26, 2016.
lucas jackson reuter
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in January that 2024 will be the year that AI becomes “the most premium part of every PC.”
The company already offers a paid chatbot assistant, Copilot, in its Bing search engine and Office productivity software. In the future, PC users will be able to learn more about how AI is built into Windows and what they can do with it on the new AI PC.
Build comes just days after Google I/O, where the search giant unveiled its most powerful AI model to date and showed how Gemini AI works on computers and mobile phones. Ahead of Google's event, OpenAI announced a new GPT-4o model. Microsoft is his lead investor in OpenAI, and the company's Copilot technology is based on OpenAI's model.
For Microsoft, the challenge is twofold. The goal is to maintain its preeminent position in the AI space and strengthen PC sales, which have been sluggish for the past two years due to the pandemic-induced upgrade cycle.
In a recent note on Dell to investors, Morgan Stanley analyst Eric Woodring cited customer comments and recent upward revisions to the Notebook original design manufacturer (ODM) product. In light of this, he said he remains “bullish on the recovery of the PC market.”
Technology industry researcher Gartner estimates that PC shipments rose 0.9% in the quarter after years of weakness. Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said during the company's quarterly earnings call last month that PC demand was “slightly better than expected.”
Microsoft's new AI tools could give business and consumer customers another reason to upgrade their aging computers, whether they're made by HP, Dell or Lenovo.
“While Copilot for Windows does not directly drive monetization, it does increase Windows usage, Windows retention, and customer migration to higher priced and more powerful PCs (thus increasing Microsoft's revenue per device. ), and likely drive search revenue,'' Bernstein analysts wrote in a note to investors on April 26, the day after Microsoft reported earnings. is written in.
Microsoft will provide the software to handle some of the AI tasks sent to the internet, but its computers will be equipped with chips from AMD, Intel and Qualcomm for offline AI jobs. This includes, for example, using your voice to ask Copilot to summarize your transcription without being connected.
An important hardware addition to the AI PC is the so-called neural processing unit. NPUs go beyond the capabilities of traditional central processing units (CPUs) and are specifically designed to handle artificial intelligence tasks. It has traditionally been used by companies like Apple to improve photos and videos, or for voice recognition.
Microsoft has not yet revealed what AI PC can do without an internet connection. But Google's Pixel 8 Pro phone doesn't have a full computer processor and can use Gemini Nano AI to summarize and transcribe recordings and recommend text message responses. Masu.
Computers powered by Intel's latest Lunar Lake chips with dedicated NPUs are expected to arrive in late 2024. Qualcomm's Snapdragon
Intel says the chip will enable things like “real-time language translation, automated reasoning, and enhanced gaming environments.”
Apple has been using NPUs for years and recently highlighted them with its new M4 chip for the iPad Pro. The M4 chip is expected to launch in the next Macs later this year.
Qualcomm, unlike Intel and AMD, offers chips with Arm-based architecture. One of Microsoft's sessions will talk about “Next Generation Windows on Arm,” and will cover how Windows runs on Qualcomm chips and how it differs from Intel and AMD versions of Windows. .
According to recent data from Canalys, Intel still controls 78% of the PC chip market, followed by AMD with 13%.
Qualcomm has previously promoted its Snapdragon Arm-based computers by touting benefits such as longer battery life, thinner designs, and cellular connectivity. But previous versions of Qualcomm's chips were limited in what they could offer consumers. For example, in 2018, the company's Snapdragon 835 chip was unable to run most Windows applications.
Microsoft has since improved Windows to handle legacy apps on Arm, but questions remain. The company also has an FAQ page specifically for computers running on ARM hardware.
Microsoft will also host sessions like “AI Everywhere,” which will cover how to “accelerate generative AI models” on devices running in the cloud.
In the Azure AI Studio session, developers explore how to create their own Copilot chatbots. This could be similar to what Google and OpenAI are doing with Gemini and ChatGPT. For example, imagine a company building a chatbot that helps employees choose health insurance.
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