Comment by Legend2440
2 days ago
Laptop manufacturers are too desperate to cash on the AI craze. There's nothing special about an 'AI PC'. It's just a regular PC with Windows Copilot... which is a standard Windows feature anyway.
>I don't want this garbage on my laptop, especially when its running of its battery!
The one bit of good news is it's not going to impact your battery life because it doesn't do any on-device processing. It's just calling an LLM in the cloud.
That's not quite correct. Snapdragon chips that are advertised as being good for "AI" also come with the Hexagon DSP, which is now used for (or targeted at) AI applications. It's essentially a separate vector processor with large vector sizes.
> It's just a regular PC with Windows Copilot... which is a standard Windows feature anyway.
"AI PC" branded devices get "Copilot+" and additional crap that comes with that due to the NPU. Despite desktops having GPUs with up to 50x more TOPs than the requirement, they don't get all that for some reason https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/copilot-pc/323616/microsoft-...
Is Microsoft trying to help NPU chip makers?
When is Wintel going to finally happen?
Microsoft has roughly $102 billion in cash (+ short-term investments). Intel’s market value is approximately $176 billion.
I've never really understood why Microsoft helped Intel's bottom line over decades.
With Azure, Microsoft has even more reason to buy Intel.
Doesn't this lead to a lot of tension between the hardware makers and Microsoft?
MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.
Laptop manufacturers are making laptops that can run an LLM locally, but there's no point in that unless there's a local LLM to run (and Windows won't have that because Copilot). Are they going to be pre-installing Llama on new laptops?
Are we going to see a new power user / normal user split? Where power users buy laptops with LLMs installed, that can run them, and normal folks buy something that can call Copilot?
Any ideas?
It isn't just copilot that these laptops come with; manufacturers are already putting their own AI chat apps as well.
For example, the LG gram I recently got came with just such an app named Chat, though the "ai button" on the keyboard (really just right alt or control, I forget which) defaults to copilot.
If there's any tension at all, it's just who gets to be the default app for the "ai button" on the keyboard that I assume almost nobody actually uses.
Interesting. Yeah, that'll be the argument
> MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.
MS doesn't care where your data is, they're happy to go digging through your C drive to collect/mine whatever they want, assuming you can avoid all the dark patterns they use to push you to save everything on OneDrive anyway and they'll record all your interactions with any other AI using Recall
MS doesn't want your data in the first place. Nobody cares about or wants your data. You are not special.
I had assumed that they needed the usage to justify the investment in the data centre, but you could be right and they don't care.
It's just marketing. The laptop makers will market it as if your laptop power makes a difference knowing full well that it's offloaded to the cloud.
For a slightly more charitable perspective, agentic AI means that there is still a bunch of stuff happening on the local machine, it's just not the inference itself.
Copilot is a local LLM (well SLM). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/phi-silica
There's nothing special with what Intel has lowered the bar as an AI PC so vendors can market it. Ollama can run a 4b model plenty fine on Tiger Lake with 8gb classic RAM.
But unified memory IS truly what makes an AI ready PC. The Apple Silicon proves that. People are willing to pay the premium, and I suspect unified memory will still be around and bringing us benefits even if no one cares about LLMs in 5 years.
Even collecting and sending all that data to the cloud is going to drain battery life. I'd really rather my devices only do what I ask them to than have AI running the background all the time trying to be helpful or just silently collecting data.
Copilot is just ChatGPT as an app.
If you don't use it, it will have no impact on your device. And it's not sending your data to the cloud except for anything you paste into it.
So, the new AI features like recall don’t exist?
Windows is going more and more into AI and embedding it into the core of the OS as much as it can. It’s not “an app”, even if that was true now it wouldn't be true for very long. The strategy is well communicated.
>> I'd really rather my devices only do what I ask them to
Linux hears your cry. You have a choice. Make it.
Unfortunately still loads of hurdles for most people.
AAA Games with anti-cheat that don't support Linux.
Video editing (DaVinci Resolve exists but is a pain to get up and running on many distros, KDenLive/OpenShot don't really cut it for most)
Adobe Suite (Photoshop/Lightroom specifically, and Premiere for Video Editing) - would like to see Affinity support Linux but hasn't happened so far. GIMP and DarkTable aren't really substitutions unless you pour a lot of time into them.
Tried moving to Linux on my laptop this past month, made it a month before a reinstall of Windows 11. Had issues with WiFi chip (managed to fix but had to edit config files deep in the system, not ideal), Fedora with LUKS encryption after a kernel update the keyboard wouldn't work to input the encryption key, no Windows Hello-like support (face ID). Had the most success with EndeavourOS but running Arch is a chore for most.
It's getting there, best it's ever been, but there's still hurdles.
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Part of me is starting to think Valve is going to be the best thing to happen to Linux (in this regard) since Ubuntu.
AI PCs also have NPUs which I guess provide accelerated matmuls, albeit less accelerated than a good discrete GPU.