Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot key.
Tom Warren at The Verge
I lack the words in any of the languages I know to describe the utter disdain I have for this.
Thom Holwerda,
I’d like to ask if your disdain is for the concept of an “AI PC” in general, or just “Microsoft’s Copilot key” requirement?
Personally I feel AI applications can bring new innovation and running them locally is a welcome departure from the AI as a service walled gardens. However if the AI PC functionality ends up being vendor locked to microsoft or anyone else, then I will disdain it as well.
I kinda get disdain. I’m not sure this means jack to the average user. It’s just marketing to differentiate the “old” from the “new”. G’z. It’s banal at best.
As long as Linux users with no interest in Copilot can still demand a refund for the preinstalled OS and the Copilot key, I’m tentatively OK with this.
ssokolow (Hey, OSAlert, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
Who has been able to demand a refund for the preinstalled OS? Having tried this myself, I don’t think most vendors will listen – you’re forced to buy the OS as a bundle and that’s that. I’m genuinely curious what you mean though.
Last I heard, there was some kind of legal judgement that required Microsoft to honour requests to revoke and refund preinstalled license keys if you’re willing to jump through the bureaucratic hoops.
I’ve never needed to try because the last prebuilt PC that I didn’t receive as a used hand-me-down was the HP Pavilion 8160 we got as a family PC in 1997.
…and I just realized that this might not be talking about a license key now. Shows how badly I slept yesterday.
…well, how badly I slept and how much that whole “banner blindness” thing has extended to “worthless article stock art header blindness”. If you only read the text on that Verge article, it’s very easy to interpret it as potentially being a license key accompanied by some new analogue to Windows Logo stickers, which Dell put on their keyboards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
ssokolow (Hey, OSAlert, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
Banner confusion aside, I’m still curious about your original point. I don’t remember hearing about this and the prebuilt vendors I’ve dealt with simply refused to unbundle windows, one sales rep refused to escalate to a manager. I’d be interested in learning if cases have been decided in favor of consumers who want the hardware without the OS.
It’s been at least half a decade since whatever it was I read, so my memory was a bit hazy.
I did a little quick digging and it looks like the current state of things is that Microsoft does delegate the responsibility for refunding to the OEMs, and that some jurisdictions, such as France and Italy, have had legal rulings that refusing to honour requests for refunding just the bundled Windows license violates applicable law.
The FSF has a listing of jurisdiction-specific information at https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/WindowsTaxRefund#Information_for_specific_countries
I understand the idea Thom is stating. It’s not about the evolution of AI for domestic users, it is specifically the addition of a key for a service you are not sure it will survive. Let’s talk about the case of the Cortana button. Some way or another, the folks at Microsoft thought that Cortana was going to last forever, until the last moment we saw it was cut.
Do we have the confidence to say this button will last forever? If you try to create a new key in a keyboard, at least it’s better to make sure it is for a sans-internet feature.
I don’t mind having a key, but it should join the other media keys like volume and internet buttons. If manufacturers replace the CTRL key, as it’s being depicted, then it would be a major disservice to everyone who actually needs the regular CTRL key. It’s literally the most worn key on my keyboard because I happen to use the right CTRL+arrow keys (and other CTRL hotkeys) extensively for text editing. Getting rid of it would immediately cause typing issues.
*nod* It’s bad enough that more and more keyboard manufacturers seem to want a 103-key layout that forces me to either remap the menu key or live with having to type a lot of my custom global hotkeys two-handed.
ohh… crap… RCtrl and Context Menu keys are useful. I hope sharpkeys can return their function.
In other words, this is an AI solution consisting of local NPU hardware and Microsoft cloud AI. It would be more reasonable if the hardware level was generic and not tied to any single player’s cloud technology, and support for any cloud keys would be implemented at the operating system level.
This is 100% MBAs forcing the button on everyone and hoping to come up with a plan to make it profitable latter. These chat toys are still pretty useless outside of a handful of professions. It would probably be more profitable if they didn’t do this, but they prefer the fiction of tons of people signing up for it because it’s in their face.
Reminds me of a video I recently saw which ended with saying that one of the reasons that cryptocurrency and NFTs have waned so sharply is that most of the grifters have jumped ship to A.I.
Usage off LLMs and pre-trained engines is available and free today for any Linux distro, without network.
The “interesting” part would be training, and well, frankly, that’s not the job of “a PC”, but of a very expensive farm of equipment.
With that said, the performance of using an LLM AI responder (talking client, non-training on a PC) is greatly accelerated by an Nvidia GPU (and yes, I said Nvidia). Obviously, in the future (not today) I expect more non-Nvidia players on Linux as well.
With regard to usefulness, I find that if I’m pretty good at specifying my requirements, these AI engines can generate pretty good code that doesn’t require too much tweaking. It’s quite possible that some simple communication (AI to AI) could someday produce some interesting behaviors with regards to the creation and running of programs (let that sink in a bit) without apparent human intervention. To what end? Could just be random innocuous garbage. Could be an abomination. Could be something else…
First TPM, now this! I have zero interest in AI, as of now, it’s nothing more than a buzzword with no real progress IMO. I see that that term is used by and large to drive investment into NVIDIA, ARM, Qualcomm, AMD, Intel, and everybody else in that market. This key in itself forces OEMs to preinstall Windows in desktops and SERVERS, disabling such will disable OpenAI enables AI features, I believe. Enabling, will disable BARD and other competition to OpenAI/M$ IMO.
Why do so many commenters in tech blogs seem to hate tech? It’s so bizarre.
It’s like sneaker heads going to sneaker blogs complaining about a company introducing a new sneaker.
Mostly due to such tech being a consequence of a monopolism forcing it down our throats. We never really asked for it, outside some niche segments, and still we will be forced to read about it until this bubble bursts. Just like it happened to most of other things Microsoft pushed for, after Windows. And even Windows is a fossil now, decades of rot involved. Version after version on where the biggest feature was on where will the icons on the dock be positioned this time.
Stop using “we” when referring to yourself. You most definitely are not talking for me.
Your subjective opinions are not as widespread or universal as you seem to assume.
Even you questioned in your original comment, on why so many.
And?