Microsoft gives users more reasons to return to Windows

On May 20 local time, on the eve of the opening of the annual Build Developer Conference, Microsoft held a new product launch conference with leading PC brands such as Dell, Lenovo, Acer, ASUS, HP and Samsung.

These new computers are all equipped with Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite chip, a new button that can wake up the AI assistant with one click, and the protagonist of last year's Build conference, Copilot. Microsoft has unified a name for them as "Copilot+PC".

Microsoft is trying to use this release to define AI PCs - there are CPUs, GPUs and NPUs (neural processing units), which can execute 40 trillion calculations (TOPS) per second, and at least 16GB RAM and 256 GB SSD memory. According to this standard, the M3 MacBook Air released by Apple a few months ago will be excluded because the M3 computing power is only 18 TOPS, and the basic configuration of the MacBook Air is only 8GB RAM.

Microsoft CEO Nadella believes that AI PC enables Windows to rekindle the competition with Mac. Over the past years, the stronger performance and power consumption helped Mac capture a lot of Windows shares and become the best choice for some office users.

I hope we can bring benign competition on PCs. I mean, Apple is doing very well. We hope to make Windows and Mac compete again in the era of artificial intelligence—— Microsoft CEO Nadella

Copilot, with AI blessing, provides some new functions that make people shine. For example, Copilot will remember everything that users have done on the computer. Users can directly ask Copilot about the website information, documents, photos and videos that they visited a few months ago. Another function called Cocreator allows users to create AI images through the combination of hand drawing and text prompts.

Since the era of the Internet and smart phones, Nadella has been looking for a new fulcrum to attract users to use Windows. Now AI has made it possible from both the software and hardware levels.

This is why Nadella is paranoid about AI ALL IN. A few weeks ago, he visited Agroz, an agricultural technology start-up in Malaysia. When the management of Agroz made a presentation, Nadella found the word "Llama" flashing in the corner of a page in the PPT - this is the open source model of competitor Meta.

So Nadella asked Adrian Li, CEO of Agroz, why did he use Llama when he used GPT-4. The other party was embarrassed to explain that the company eventually wanted to use humanoid robots for seeding, and robots might need to be operated offline. Some of the parameters of Llama are small enough to be embedded in mobile devices such as robots or mobile phones.

Then Nadella switched to the sales role and began to talk to Agroz about a small language model Phi developed inside Microsoft: it has only 3.8 billion parameters, is also open source, and can run locally. (Qiu Hao)