News in the universe of AI comes in a torrent. This week, on center stage we have Microsoft, which makes available to computer manufacturers the new Windows operating system that will make possible the concept of the PC with built-in artificial intelligence (AI PC in English). The idea is that computers can use AI without needing a connection to the outside world. The presentation had a controversial aspect related to privacy and certified that the new era will require new hardware. The implicit message is that the industry will ask us to renew the world’s supply of computers. All this in the same week in which Scarlett Johansson forced OpenAI to remove a voice from ChatGPT for its GPT-4o language model that was suspiciously similar to hers, precisely the voice with which she embodied an AI in the movie Her.
The new category of computers announced by Microsoft is called Copilot PC and they have processors with an integrated neural unit (NPU) to be able to perform AI tasks directly in their guts, without having to connect to the cloud. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that these devices will carry Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus processors, based on the ARM architecture, like Apple Silicon. Two computing giants are left out at the moment, Intel and AMD, which use the x86 architecture in their processors, although they participated in the presentation and will join the platform as soon as they have their new chips with processors suitable for artificial intelligence ready.
To make these changes, Microsoft has had to create an internal system within Windows called Prism that adapts programs created for x86 on the fly so that they run on ARM. Apple did the same at two points in its history with Rosetta and Rosetta 2, two translators that allowed their users to experience the transition between theoretically incompatible hardware systems. “The goal has always been to have computers that understand us instead of us understanding the computers,” Nadella said to define this new era. Several manufacturers (Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung and Microsoft itself) have already announced new models with these features. The forecast is to sell 50 million in one year.
These PCs designed for AI have a neural unit capable of performing more than 40 trillion operations per second and Microsoft assured that these machines are 58% faster than Apple’s MacBook Air M3, although perhaps the most powerful PCs in history They should have been compared to the most powerful Macs, MacBook Pro with the M3 Max chip. The apple company has powered a new iPad Pro with a new chip called M4 that has increased the number of NPU cores and reaches 38 billion operations per second.
But the function that has attracted the most attention among everything that the Redmond multinational presented is a function called Recall that records screenshots of everything the user does on the PC throughout their work day, so that You can go back to any point in the past whenever you need to. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) of the United Kingdom, the data control body in that country, has already asked Microsoft for explanations about this function. The company claims that users “can limit the snapshots that Recall collects,” that their data “is only stored locally and cannot be accessed by Microsoft or anyone without access to the device.”
Microsoft’s Copilot is going to provide the highly capable GPT-4o AI, the same one that OpenAI introduced on May 13 with a voice called Sky in its ChatGPT chatbot that was reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson. The actress has asked the company to withdraw that voice and has explained that the company tried to hire her until the last moment before the presentation, an offer that she rejected. OpenAI has assured that it hired an actress for that voice, but the suspicion that it cloned Johansson has remained in the air. Reality continues to bring us closer to the science fiction world of Her.
