Can Artificial Intelligence Make the PC Cool Again?

The race to put artificial intelligence everywhere is taking a detour through the good old laptop computer.

Microsoft on Monday introduced a new kind of computer designed for artificial intelligence. The machines, Microsoft says, will run A.I. systems on chips and other gear inside the computers so they are faster, more personal and more private.

The new computers, called Copilot+ PC, will allow people to use A.I. to make it easier to find documents and files they have worked on, emails they have read, or websites they have browsed. Their A.I. systems will also automate tasks like photo editing and language translation.

The new design will be included in Microsoft’s Surface laptops and high-end products that run on the Windows operating system offered by Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung, some of the largest PC makers in the world.

The A.I. PC, industry analysts believe, could reverse a longtime decline in the importance of the personal computer. For the last two decades, the demand for the fastest laptops has diminished because so much software was moved into cloud computing centers. A strong internet connection and web browser was all most people needed.

But A.I. stretches that long-distance relationship to its limits. ChatGPT and other generative A.I. tools are run in data centers stuffed with expensive and sophisticated chips that can process the largest, most advanced systems. Even the most cutting-edge chatbots take time to receive a query, process it and send back a response. It is also extremely expensive to manage.

Microsoft wants to run A.I. systems directly on a personal computer to eliminate that lag time and cut the price. Microsoft has been shrinking the size of A.I. systems, called models, to make them easier to run outside of data centers. It said more than 40 will run directly on the laptops. The smaller models are generally not as powerful or accurate as the most cutting-edge A.I. systems, but they are improving enough to be useful to the average consumer.

“We are entering a new era where computers not only understands us, but can anticipate what we want and our intents,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, at an event at its headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

Analysts expect Apple to follow suit next month at its conference for software developers, where the company will announce an overhaul for Siri, its virtual assistant, and an overall strategy for integrating more A.I. capabilities into its laptops and iPhones.

Whether the A.I. PC takes off depends on the companies’ ability to create compelling reasons for buyers to upgrade. The initial sales of these new computers, which cost more than $1,000, will be small, said Linn Huang, an analyst at IDC, which closely tracks the market. But by the end of the decade — assuming A.I. tools turn out to be useful — they will be “ubiquitous,” he predicted. “Everything will be an A.I. PC.”

The computer industry is looking for a jolt. Consumers have been upgrading their own computers less frequently, as the music and photos they once stored on their machines now often live online, on Spotify, Netflix or iCloud. Computer purchases by companies, schools and other institutions have finally stabilized after booming — and then crashing — during the pandemic.

Some high-end smartphones have already been integrating A.I. chips, but the sales have fallen short because the features “are still not sophisticated enough to catalyze a faster upgrade cycle,” Mehdi Hosseini, an analyst at Susquehanna International Group, wrote in a research note. It will be at least another year, he said, before enough meaningful breakthroughs will lead consumers to take note.

At the event, Microsoft showed new laptops with what it likened to having a photographic memory. The laptops can recall whatever a user asks it to find because the A.I. systems are constantly scanning everything the user does on the laptop. Microsoft said the information used for this “recall” function was stored directly on the laptop for privacy, and would not be sent back to the company’s servers or to be used in training future A.I. systems.

Microsoft also demonstrated live transcripts that translate in real time, which it said would be available on any video that streams across a laptop’s screen.

Microsoft last month released A.I. models small enough to run on a phone that it said performed almost as well as GPT-3.5, the much larger system that initially underpinned OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot when it debuted in late 2022.

(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)

Chipmakers have also made advances, like adjusting a laptop’s battery life to allow for the enormous number of calculations that A.I. demands. The new computers have dedicated chips built by Qualcomm, the largest chip provider for smartphones.

Though the type of chip inside the new A.I. computers, known as a neural processing unit, specializes in handling complex A.I. tasks, such as generating images and summarizing documents, the benefits may still be unnoticeable to consumers, said Subbarao Kambhampati, a professor and researcher of artificial intelligence at Arizona State University.

Most of the data processing for A.I. still has to be done on a company’s servers instead of directly on the devices, so it’s still important that people have a fast internet connection, he added.

But the neural processing chips also speed up other tasks, such as video editing or the ability to use a virtual background inside a video call, said Brad Linder, the editor of Liliputing, a blog that has covered computers for nearly two decades. So, even if people don’t buy into the hype surrounding artificial intelligence, they may end up getting an A.I. computer for other reasons.