No (Local) AI Developer Left Behind? (Premium)

Microsoft has some notable AI wins for developers, GitHub Copilot being key among them. But despite being announced 9 months ago, the Windows Copilot Runtime is still a no-show as I write this. That may finally be changing, though the value proposition of these technologies is unclear given the relatively small addressable market for on-device AI.
? A bit of recent history
Microsoft formally announced the Windows Copilot Runtime during Build 2024 on May 21, 2024. This was a surprise to me because there was no mention of it in the Book of News that Microsoft provided to press and bloggers ahead of the event. And Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had previously uttered this term the day before at the Copilot+ PC launch without ever explaining what it was. So it's been miscommunicated from the start.

"Every developer can take advantage of it," Nadella said during the Copilot+ PC event, referring to what was then being positioned as a wave of innovation tied to Copilot+ PCs and their powerful and efficient NPUs. "What Win32 meant for the graphical user interface, the new Windows Copilot Runtime that we're announcing today will be to AI."

This statement is incorrect. At least twice.

Win32 was the standard set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that Microsoft provided to developers who wished to created native 32-bit apps for Windows, starting with Windows NT in 1993. But it was just a 32-bit version of the original Windows APIs, which were later renamed to Win16. So it was Win16, and Windows pre-NT, that kicked off the GUI era for the PC. And not to get too far off the rails here, but one might argue that Visual Basic provided an even more popular introduction to GUI programming for developers than Win16 or Win32 ever did. It was definitely a lot more accessible.

Also, the Windows Copilot Runtime is not to AI what Win32 or anything else was to the GUI. Instead, the Windows Copilot Runtime is exclusively about AI running locally on an NPU-powered Copilot+. It's a subset of AI. And at the time of this writing, it constitutes an incredibly tiny minority of overall AI usage. The vast majority runs in the cloud, and the Windows Copilot Runtime cannot help developers with that.
⁉️ So what is this thing?
I've been trying to understand the Windows Copilot Runtime (WCR) since it was first announced, but I keep running into the same issue. The name doesn't describe what it is. That is, it's very much not a runtime. Apps do not run on top of a WCR runtime that runs on top of the standard Windows runtime, as .NET apps do (with the .NET runtime inserted between apps and the standard Windows Runtime in that case). The language Microsoft uses is confusing, in part because it's commingling terms.

"A core element of our re-architecture of Windows, that's something Yusuf [Mehdi] mentioned, is the Windows Copilot Runtime," Windows lead Pavan Davuluri said later at the Copilot+ PC launch. "It is a powerful AI capability woven into every layer...