Microsoft Ignites a New AI Wave With ‘Copilot Plus PCs’

Date: May 21, 2024

Microsoft is ushering into a new era of Artificial Intelligence by launching its latest AI laptops known as Copilot Plus PCs.

Microsoft, Google, and Apple have been fighting to become a leader in the AI space. Microsoft’s last big leap into the AI sphere was the acquisition of OpenAI, the pioneer of Generative AI capabilities. In its latest efforts, Microsoft has launched Copilot Plus PCs, a first-ever AI species of laptops that come with in-built Neural capabilities. This new breed of AI-powered laptops will officially hit the market on June 18th.

The new breed of Microsoft laptops will have AI hardware and software across the Windows 11 operating system. All major laptop manufacturers, including Dell, Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Acer, and Asus, have signed up to manufacture their versions of the Copilot Plus PCs. Microsoft is also building its in-house surface line, which it claims will be compatible with the newfound AI capabilities.

The new AI series will run on ARM-based processors for Windows laptops. Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, emphasized that these AI capabilities will also be available in AMD and Intel chips running on ARM-based processors later this year. These processors will enable Edge computing, which brings the cloud-based capabilities of ChatGPT to local processors. Many small language models are also installed on PCs to provide fast language translation and other support functions for AI.

One of the most prominent functionalities that the Copilot Plus PCs offer is Recall. Recall is an opt-in AI feature that screenshots everything you do on your laptop. Whenever a user wants to search for anything they did on their PC, not just documents and media but pages, objects, and much more, the feature works on simple text prompts and can look for the entire history of your PC usage to find what you need in just a few seconds. 

Overall, about 40 Artificial Intelligence models will run in the background to provide the features Microsoft offers in its new line of PCs. Additionally, Microsoft’s AI assistant will now integrate with the cutting-edge ChatGPT-4o model to provide powerful and fast AI assistance. Yusuf Mehdi, the Head of Microsoft Windows, claims that the Copilot Plus PCs run 58% faster than Apple’s MacBook Air, which comes with the latest M3 processor. These PCs will do it all while providing all-day battery life, which can continuously run video playback for 10 hours.