The race for artificial intelligence everywhere takes a detour via the good old laptop.
Microsoft on Monday presented a new type of computer designed for artificial intelligence. According to Microsoft, the machines will run AI systems on chips and other hardware inside computers so that they are faster, more personal and more private.
The new computers, called Copilot+ PC, will allow users to use AI to make it easier to find documents and files they have worked on, emails they have read or websites they have visited . Their AI systems will also automate tasks like photo editing and language translation.
The new design will be included in Microsoft’s Surface laptops and high-end products running the Windows operating system offered by Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, some of the world’s largest PC makers .
Industry analysts say the AI PC could reverse the long-standing decline in the importance of the personal computer. Over the past two decades, demand for the fastest laptops has declined as much software has moved to cloud computing centers. Most people needed a strong internet connection and a web browser.
But AI pushes this long-distance relationship to its limits. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are run in data centers with expensive, sophisticated chips capable of processing the largest and most advanced systems. Even the most advanced chatbots take time to receive a request, process it, and return a response. It is also extremely expensive to manage.
Microsoft wants to run AI systems directly on a personal computer to eliminate this lag and reduce the price. Microsoft has reduced the size of AI systems, called models, to make it easier to run them outside of data centers. He said more than 40 would run directly on laptops. Smaller models are generally not as powerful or accurate as the most advanced AI systems, but they are improving enough to be useful to the average consumer.
“We are entering a new era where computers not only understand us, but can also anticipate what we want and our intentions,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said at an event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. .
Analysts expect Apple to follow suit next month at its software developers conference, where the company will announce an overhaul of Siri, its virtual assistant, as well as an overall strategy to integrate more AI capabilities in its laptops and iPhones.
Whether PC AI takes off depends on companies creating compelling reasons to get buyers to upgrade. Initial sales of the new computers, which cost more than $1,000, will be modest, said Linn Huang, an analyst at IDC who closely follows the market. But by the end of the decade – assuming AI tools prove useful – they will be “ubiquitous,” he predicts. “Everything will be an AI PC.”
The IT industry is looking for a boost. Consumers are upgrading their own computers less frequently because the music and photos they once stored on their machines are now often available online, on Spotify, Netflix or iCloud. Computer purchases by businesses, schools and other institutions have finally stabilized after experiencing a boom — then a crash — during the pandemic.
Some high-end smartphones already incorporate AI chips, but sales have fallen short because the features “are still not sophisticated enough to catalyze a faster upgrade cycle,” wrote Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, in a research note. . It will be at least another year, he said, before there are significant enough advances to cause consumers to take notice.
At the event, Microsoft showed off new laptops with what it likens to photographic memory. Users can ask Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot, to use a feature called Recall to search for a file by typing a natural language question, such as: “Can you find me a video call I recently had with Joe where he was holding a ‘I Do you like the New York coffee mug?’ The computer will then be able to immediately retrieve the file containing these details because the AI systems are constantly analyzing what the user is doing on the laptop. .
“It remembers things that I forget,” Matt Barlow, head of marketing for Surface computers at Microsoft, said in an interview.
Microsoft said the information used for this callback feature was stored directly on the laptop for privacy reasons and would not be sent back to the company’s servers or used in training future AI systems. Pavan Davuluri, a Microsoft executive overseeing Windows, said that with the reminder system, users could also choose not to share certain types of information, such as visits to a specific website, but only certain sensitive data , such as financial and private information. Browsing sessions would not be monitored by default.
Microsoft also showed off live transcriptions that translate in real time, which it said would be available on any video streamed to a laptop screen.
Microsoft last month released AI models small enough to run on a phone that it said worked almost as well as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that initially powered OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot when it debuted end of 2022.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement over news content related to AI systems.)
Chipmakers have also made advances, such as adjusting the battery life of a laptop to accommodate the enormous number of calculations that AI requires. The new computers feature dedicated chips built by Qualcomm, the largest supplier of smartphone chips.
Although the type of chip inside new AI computers, known as a neural processing unit, is specialized for handling complex AI tasks, such as image generation and synthesis documents, the benefits may still go unnoticed by consumers, said Subbarao Kambhampati, professor and researcher. in artificial intelligence at Arizona State University.
Most data processing for AI still needs to be done on a company’s servers rather than directly on devices, so it’s still important that people have a fast internet connection, he added .
But neural processing chips also speed up other tasks, such as video editing or the ability to use a virtual background during a video call, said Brad Linder, editor-in-chief of Liliputing, a blog that has been covering computers for almost two decades. So even if people don’t buy into the hype around artificial intelligence, they might end up getting an AI computer for other reasons.