A New AI Era Continues, For Better or Worse (Premium)

The day that Microsoft introduced the world to its new Copilot+ PC branding, I took a press bus from my hotel in Seattle to the firm's Redmond campus and was immediately confronted by a large sign with a Copilot logo reading, "A new AI era begins." This messaging was repeated on banner flags attached to every light pole on the walk from the bus to the temporary event space the firm had set up on the edge of a soccer field in the recently modernized campus. And a wall with the same "A new AI era begins" tagline stood between me--and the other press, bloggers, and YouTubers who entered this tent-like structure--and the seats in front of the stage at which the software giant would finally discuss its plans that day.

It was May 20, 2024. And I've been looking for clarity ever since.

Copilot+ PC was born in confusion, and that confusion has reined ever since. Microsoft didn't help--its initial guileless introduction of the controversial Recall feature that's since been delayed for so long we still don't have it today was the initial warning sign--and so we did our best. In his initial post about this branding, Laurent compared it to Intel's Ultrabook brand, a specification--since overtaken by the far less obvious Evo brand--noting that it promoted a new category of PC that would deliver unique AI experiences. That's accurate, but I've since expanded on that notion by comparing it to the multimedia PCs of the 1990s and the Media Center and Tablet PCs of the early 2000s because I feel that this designation is temporary. That is, we won't need the Copilot+ PC branding, or the vaguer but better AI PC branding, in the years ahead because all PCs will meet its requirements and be capable of delivering the same capabilities.

As Microsoft explained at the time, the first wave of Copilot+ PCs were based on Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X chips, which brought Windows 11 on Arm to the mainstream with the terrific efficiency, battery life, performance, and compatibility that customers had demanded for years but never received from this platform. But Copilot+ PC was never going to be restricted to Snapdragon, and the primary calling card of this branding--the "new AI era," if you will--was always more about the on-device AI capabilities that were afforded by having a powerful NPU (neural processing unit) built into the PC's SoC (system on a chip).

AI is inherently confusing. It arrived suddenly, like a freight train barreling unexpected into a station, a suddenly potent force that, like Windows on Arm, we'd been hearing about for years but to no avail. This is easy to forget, but Microsoft exploded on the scene in February 2023 with its cloud-based and OpenAI ChatGPT 4-powered Bing AI capabilities, setting off an "AI era" that is sharply different from what it is promoting now. In the chaotic year that followed, it rebranded its AI, wisely, to Copilot, and announced and then delivered a sweeping set of AI offerings and functionality across all its...