Can AI Make the PC Cool Again? Microsoft Thinks So. – The New York Times
Artificial Intelligence
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Microsoft, HP, Dell and others unveiled a new kind of laptop tailored to work with artificial intelligence. Analysts expect Apple to do something similar.
Karen Weise and
Karen Weise reported from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and Brian X. Chen from San Francisco.
The race to put artificial intelligence everywhere is taking a detour through the good old laptop computer.
Microsoft on Monday introduced a new kind of computer designed for artificial intelligence. The machines, Microsoft says, will run A.I. systems on chips and other gear inside the computers so they are faster, more personal and more private.
The new computers, called Copilot+ PC, will allow people to use A.I. to make it easier to find documents and files they have worked on, emails they have read, or websites they have browsed. Their A.I. 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 that run on the Windows operating system offered by Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, some of the largest PC makers in the world.
The A.I. PC, industry analysts believe, could reverse a longtime decline in the importance of the personal computer. For the last two decades, the demand for the fastest laptops has diminished because so much software was moved into cloud computing centers. A strong internet connection and web browser was all most people needed.
But A.I. stretches that long-distance relationship to its limits. ChatGPT and other generative A.I. tools are run in data centers stuffed with expensive and sophisticated chips that can process the largest, most advanced systems. Even the most cutting-edge chatbots take time to receive a query, process it and send back a response. It is also extremely expensive to manage.
Microsoft wants to run A.I. systems directly on a personal computer to eliminate that lag time and cut the price. Microsoft has been shrinking the size of A.I. systems, called models, to make them easier to run outside of data centers. It said more than 40 will run directly on the laptops. The smaller models are generally not as powerful or accurate as the most cutting-edge A.I. 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 anticipate what we want and our intents,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, at an event at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
Analysts expect Apple to follow suit next month at its conference for software developers, where the company will announce an overhaul for Siri, its virtual assistant, and an overall strategy for integrating more A.I. capabilities into its laptops and iPhones.
Whether the A.I. PC takes off depends on the companies’ ability to create compelling reasons for buyers to upgrade. The initial sales of these new computers, which cost more than $1,000, will be small, said Linn Huang, an analyst at IDC, which closely tracks the market. But by the end of the decade — assuming A.I. tools turn out to be useful — they will be “ubiquitous,” he predicted. “Everything will be an A.I. PC.”
The computer industry is looking for a jolt. Consumers have been upgrading their own computers less frequently, as the music and photos they once stored on their machines now often live online, on Spotify, Netflix or iCloud. Computer purchases by companies, schools and other institutions have finally stabilized after booming — and then crashing — during the pandemic.
Some high-end smartphones have already been integrating A.I. chips, but the sales have fallen short because the features “are still not sophisticated enough to catalyze a faster upgrade cycle,” Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, wrote in a research note. It will be at least another year, he said, before enough meaningful breakthroughs will lead consumers to take note.
At the event, Microsoft showed new laptops with what it likened to having a photographic memory. Users can ask Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot, to use a feature called Recall to look up a file by typing a question using natural language, such as, “Can you find me a video call I had with Joe recently where he was holding an ‘I Love New York’ coffee mug?” The computer will then immediately be able to retrieve the file containing those details because the A.I. systems are constantly scanning what the user does on the laptop.
“It remembers things that I forget,” said Matt Barlow, Microsoft’s head of marketing for Surface computers, in an interview.
Microsoft said the information used for this Recall function was stored directly on the laptop for privacy, and would not be sent back to the company’s servers or be used in training future A.I. systems. Pavan Davuluri, a Microsoft executive overseeing Windows, said that with the Recall system users would also be able to opt out of sharing certain types of information, such as visits to a specific website, but that some sensitive data, such as financial information and private browsing sessions, would not be monitored by default.
Microsoft also demonstrated live transcripts that translate in real time, which it said would be available on any video that streams across a laptop’s screen.
Microsoft last month released A.I. models small enough to run on a phone that it said performed almost as well as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that initially underpinned OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot when it debuted in late 2022.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
Chipmakers have also made advances, like adjusting a laptop’s battery life to allow for the enormous number of calculations that A.I. demands. The new computers have dedicated chips built by Qualcomm, the largest chip provider for smartphones.
Though the type of chip inside the new A.I. computers, known as a neural processing unit, specializes in handling complex A.I. tasks, such as generating images and summarizing documents, the benefits may still be unnoticeable to consumers, said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor and researcher of artificial intelligence at Arizona State University.
Most of the data processing for A.I. still has to be done on a company’s servers instead of directly on the devices, so it’s still important that people have a fast internet connection, he added.
But the neural processing chips also speed up other tasks, such as video editing or the ability to use a virtual background inside a video call, said Brad Linder, the editor of Liliputing, a blog that has covered computers for nearly two decades. So, even if people don’t buy into the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, they may end up getting an A.I. computer for other reasons.
Karen Weise writes about technology and is based in Seattle. Her coverage focuses on Amazon and Microsoft, two of the most powerful companies in America. More about Karen Weise
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use. More about Brian X. Chen
News and Analysis
Google’s A.I. capabilities that answer people’s questions have generated a litany of untruths and errors — including recommending glue as part of a pizza recipe and the ingesting of rocks for nutrients — causing a furor online.
News Corp, the Murdoch-owned empire of publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, announced that it had agreed to a deal with OpenAI to share its content to train and service A.I. chatbots.
The Silicon Valley company Nvidia was again lifted by sales of its A.I. chips, but it faces growing competition and heightened expectations.
The Age of A.I.
D’Youville University in Buffalo had an A.I. robot speak at its commencement. Not everyone was happy about it.
A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors for A.I. careers.
Publishers have long worried that A.I.-generated answers on Google would drive readers away from their sites. They’re about to find out if those fears are warranted, our tech columnist writes.
A new category of apps promises to relieve parents of drudgery, with an assist from A.I. But a family’s grunt work is more human, and valuable, than it seems.
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This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
Advertisement
Supported by
Microsoft, HP, Dell and others unveiled a new kind of laptop tailored to work with artificial intelligence. Analysts expect Apple to do something similar.
Karen Weise and
Karen Weise reported from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and Brian X. Chen from San Francisco.
The race to put artificial intelligence everywhere is taking a detour through the good old laptop computer.
Microsoft on Monday introduced a new kind of computer designed for artificial intelligence. The machines, Microsoft says, will run A.I. systems on chips and other gear inside the computers so they are faster, more personal and more private.
The new computers, called Copilot+ PC, will allow people to use A.I. to make it easier to find documents and files they have worked on, emails they have read, or websites they have browsed. Their A.I. 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 that run on the Windows operating system offered by Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, some of the largest PC makers in the world.
The A.I. PC, industry analysts believe, could reverse a longtime decline in the importance of the personal computer. For the last two decades, the demand for the fastest laptops has diminished because so much software was moved into cloud computing centers. A strong internet connection and web browser was all most people needed.
But A.I. stretches that long-distance relationship to its limits. ChatGPT and other generative A.I. tools are run in data centers stuffed with expensive and sophisticated chips that can process the largest, most advanced systems. Even the most cutting-edge chatbots take time to receive a query, process it and send back a response. It is also extremely expensive to manage.
Microsoft wants to run A.I. systems directly on a personal computer to eliminate that lag time and cut the price. Microsoft has been shrinking the size of A.I. systems, called models, to make them easier to run outside of data centers. It said more than 40 will run directly on the laptops. The smaller models are generally not as powerful or accurate as the most cutting-edge A.I. 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 anticipate what we want and our intents,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, at an event at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.
Analysts expect Apple to follow suit next month at its conference for software developers, where the company will announce an overhaul for Siri, its virtual assistant, and an overall strategy for integrating more A.I. capabilities into its laptops and iPhones.
Whether the A.I. PC takes off depends on the companies’ ability to create compelling reasons for buyers to upgrade. The initial sales of these new computers, which cost more than $1,000, will be small, said Linn Huang, an analyst at IDC, which closely tracks the market. But by the end of the decade — assuming A.I. tools turn out to be useful — they will be “ubiquitous,” he predicted. “Everything will be an A.I. PC.”
The computer industry is looking for a jolt. Consumers have been upgrading their own computers less frequently, as the music and photos they once stored on their machines now often live online, on Spotify, Netflix or iCloud. Computer purchases by companies, schools and other institutions have finally stabilized after booming — and then crashing — during the pandemic.
Some high-end smartphones have already been integrating A.I. chips, but the sales have fallen short because the features “are still not sophisticated enough to catalyze a faster upgrade cycle,” Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, wrote in a research note. It will be at least another year, he said, before enough meaningful breakthroughs will lead consumers to take note.
At the event, Microsoft showed new laptops with what it likened to having a photographic memory. Users can ask Copilot, Microsoft’s chatbot, to use a feature called Recall to look up a file by typing a question using natural language, such as, “Can you find me a video call I had with Joe recently where he was holding an ‘I Love New York’ coffee mug?” The computer will then immediately be able to retrieve the file containing those details because the A.I. systems are constantly scanning what the user does on the laptop.
“It remembers things that I forget,” said Matt Barlow, Microsoft’s head of marketing for Surface computers, in an interview.
Microsoft said the information used for this Recall function was stored directly on the laptop for privacy, and would not be sent back to the company’s servers or be used in training future A.I. systems. Pavan Davuluri, a Microsoft executive overseeing Windows, said that with the Recall system users would also be able to opt out of sharing certain types of information, such as visits to a specific website, but that some sensitive data, such as financial information and private browsing sessions, would not be monitored by default.
Microsoft also demonstrated live transcripts that translate in real time, which it said would be available on any video that streams across a laptop’s screen.
Microsoft last month released A.I. models small enough to run on a phone that it said performed almost as well as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that initially underpinned OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot when it debuted in late 2022.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)
Chipmakers have also made advances, like adjusting a laptop’s battery life to allow for the enormous number of calculations that A.I. demands. The new computers have dedicated chips built by Qualcomm, the largest chip provider for smartphones.
Though the type of chip inside the new A.I. computers, known as a neural processing unit, specializes in handling complex A.I. tasks, such as generating images and summarizing documents, the benefits may still be unnoticeable to consumers, said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor and researcher of artificial intelligence at Arizona State University.
Most of the data processing for A.I. still has to be done on a company’s servers instead of directly on the devices, so it’s still important that people have a fast internet connection, he added.
But the neural processing chips also speed up other tasks, such as video editing or the ability to use a virtual background inside a video call, said Brad Linder, the editor of Liliputing, a blog that has covered computers for nearly two decades. So, even if people don’t buy into the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, they may end up getting an A.I. computer for other reasons.
Karen Weise writes about technology and is based in Seattle. Her coverage focuses on Amazon and Microsoft, two of the most powerful companies in America. More about Karen Weise
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about the social implications of the tech we use. More about Brian X. Chen
News and Analysis
Google’s A.I. capabilities that answer people’s questions have generated a litany of untruths and errors — including recommending glue as part of a pizza recipe and the ingesting of rocks for nutrients — causing a furor online.
News Corp, the Murdoch-owned empire of publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post, announced that it had agreed to a deal with OpenAI to share its content to train and service A.I. chatbots.
The Silicon Valley company Nvidia was again lifted by sales of its A.I. chips, but it faces growing competition and heightened expectations.
The Age of A.I.
D’Youville University in Buffalo had an A.I. robot speak at its commencement. Not everyone was happy about it.
A new program, backed by Cornell Tech, M.I.T. and U.C.L.A., helps prepare lower-income, Latina and Black female computing majors for A.I. careers.
Publishers have long worried that A.I.-generated answers on Google would drive readers away from their sites. They’re about to find out if those fears are warranted, our tech columnist writes.
A new category of apps promises to relieve parents of drudgery, with an assist from A.I. But a family’s grunt work is more human, and valuable, than it seems.
Advertisement
This article was autogenerated from a news feed from CDO TIMES selected high quality news and research sources. There was no editorial review conducted beyond that by CDO TIMES staff. Need help with any of the topics in our articles? Schedule your free CDO TIMES Tech Navigator call today to stay ahead of the curve and gain insider advantages to propel your business!
