Syed Imran Haider 
Last week, both OpenAI and Google made updates to their respective offerings. This week, it was Microsoft’s turn to highlight its AI prowess.
On Monday, the software giant conducted its annual developer conference. The company’s new CoPilot+ laptops were the headliner, along with Surface Pro tablets.
These products were built around generative AI.
CoPilot computers
According to Microsoft, the new CoPilot enabled PCs would be able to remember everything. They would later be able to find anything on the screen, such as apps, websites and emails.
This is due to a Recall feature that has been introduced, which will store snapshots of everything you do. It is also possible to generate and refine AI images with CoPilot+ PCs with Cocreator.
They would also have the capability of translating over forty languages with Live Captions. They can also perform 40+ trillion operations per second (TOPS).
Despite that, they will with an all-day battery life. Microsoft said that the Recall feature is similar to having photographic memory.
It can be used to remember things users may forget and they can find it quickly and easily with the cues they remember.
The reaction
The fact that Windows will constantly record everything people do and see had mixed reactions. Some appreciated the feature, while others were concerned.
A lot of tech pundits touted it as a ‘cool’ feature. But, there were also those who called it a dangerous precedent.
The Recall feature was also compared with Rewind, which has now become Limitless AI. It had developed a similar AI tool for finding past actions via screen recordings.
CoPilot+ PCs will be able from June 18th from companies like Lenovo, Acer, Samsung, HP, Asus and Dell. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO talked about AI.
He said that it had all become possible due to the abundance of compute, mostly in the cloud. He said that it had led to GPT-4 and this had changed the world.
Cloud computing
He said that what had already happened in the cloud would now happen to Edge. This would reinvent PCs and it is exactly what these CoPilot+ PCs are all about.
According to Nadella, both internal and cloud computing would be used by CoPilot+ PCs. A new processor called the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) would be used.
Nadella said that an accelerator is needed for building an AI applications, similar to the cloud and this is what the NPU does.
To make Copilot accessible, Microsoft had announced in January that a dedicated hardware AI key would be added to Windows 11 keyboards.
According to Microsoft, the addition of the key would provide customers a simple, streamlined and powerful experience.
In December, rumors had begun circulating about Microsoft’s plans of adding CoPilot to Windows. The code name of the official update is ‘Hudson Valley’.
It is now a replacement of Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant that the company had discontinued last year in August.
Similar to Amazon and Google, Microsoft has also made hefty investments in generative AI. This includes its investment in OpenAI worth $10 billion.
