In the three days we were in Taiwan, walking among the pavilions of the (small) Computex, the question we asked ourselves several times, trying to find an answer, is whether we really need Copilot+ PCs but above all if it is really necessary to stick this label on a computer. We also talked about it with some Asus executives, the interview will be released in the next few days, supporting a basic thesis, ours, according to which talking today about Copilot+ computers and AI computers is something totally senseless.
Microsoft has created this new label to certify computers that have at least 40 TOPS of NPU (Neural Processing Unit) power, this is because 40 TOPS is the computing power necessary to be able to manage some features of Windows 11 2H24 locally such as automatic translation of subtitles, Recall and the generation of images from sketches in Paint.
This is the first problem: a Copilot+ PC has the power to handle these Windows 11 functions today, but no one assures anyone who buys a PC with this “label” today that the computer is capable of managing the AI models and functions that will also be released on Windows in the coming years.
When really cool AI features come along and won’t work on today’s computers because the NPU will be too slow, what will the producers say to those who spent almost 1500 euros for an “AI” computer hoping to be able to use it fully for at least 3/4 years?
According to estimates, the power of neural processors will grow exponentially in the coming years and only in a few years will it really be possible to run an LLM model locally without impacting too much on system resources and with performances similar to those currently offered by GPT-4 .
Today, there’s no point in going around it, everything that runs locally, especially in the generative field, on these 40 TOPS NPUs, if it works, works badly.
Recall suggests what Microsoft should do with this feature: go back in time and think again
Let’s take the three functions that Microsoft offers for Copilot+ PCs, automatic subtitling of each video, Paint with AI and Recall.
The subtitling, which we tried, works poorly because it tries to automatically translate the words it hears, without however waiting for the end of the sentence and therefore without the context. Something is translated, but in most cases the texts are illegible.
What can we say about the Paint function that creates a drawing starting from a sketch? It works just as badly: if we sketch a fish looking to the left, and ask for a drawing of a futuristic-looking robot fish, what we get is a right-oriented scrawl.
What appears on the screen is not a development of our sketch, it seems like something generated from a blank sheet of paper, with truly questionable quality.
We draw a veil of compassion over Recall, because we cannot understand how a software house like Microsoft was able to develop such a tool.
Recall, the Windows function that remembers everything we do has a serious security problem
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Not only is it a nightmare for privacy, it takes screenshots of everything we do every few seconds and if we are writing passwords, telephone numbers or sensitive data it also records those (accessible to other PC users!!!), but he doesn’t even recognize images, he can only manage with characters.
If we search for “sci” he will find all the points of the film he has memorized in which he finds the letters “sci”, and since we are dealing with pure text recognition he could also find the moments in which we were writing “leave” or “scia ”. However, you may not recognize the photos of skis.
ChatGPT is a real revolution, Copilot+ is something that we could hardly define as artificial intelligence, even if computer vision is used to search for texts in the frames and generate a SQLite database containing the words and the exact moment in which they appear.
There will be time to improve it, hopefully, but the feeling is that the 40 TOPS that Microsoft asks for are only sufficient for small low-latency models, but nothing more.
Results like those offered by ChatGPT, or Midjourney, we will only have by going from the cloud: all the promises of generative local AI in the coming years will be more marketing than substance, that is until the NPUs are powerful enough, which could take years.
Why push Copilot+ PC then?
We finally found the answer by talking to some manufacturers: Windows with CoPilot+ makes Microsoft earn more. Today for every PC sold with Windows 11 on board Microsoft charges various OEMs around $120 for licensingbut on Windows 11 computers with Copilot+ features An additional license is obviously required to obtain certification.
We do not know how much this license is, in the case of Office it is around 20 dollars, but it is still an additional cost that a Copilot+ computer manufacturer must foresee and that in some way it will be passed on to the end user. You may choose to disable Recall or other features, but you still pay for them in the price of your computer.
With Windows 12, which It will perhaps be released this year and will be called Windows 12the license will be unified (we don’t know at what price) because it will be taken for granted that every Windows 12 PC will have integrated AI.
Copilot+ PCs serve Microsoft’s bottom line more than users.
