Maybe AI is the Next Wave (Premium)

This notion of the “next wave” has come up a lot recently, and I’m working on a separate article about intelligent voice assistants and how they were once a contender but have since evolved into more of a connective tissue for existing personal computing platforms. But there’s a new wave in town now, and this one might have legs.

It’s called Artificial Intelligence, or AI, and you’re right, it’s not truly new. But what is new is that AI is suddenly going mainstream, and is fulfilling the “fake it until you make it” promises of the past. It’s doing exactly what proponents of virtual reality (VR) and augmented/mixed reality (AR/MR) believe can happen with those technologies as well.

We know that Microsoft is rumored to be bringing OpenAI-based ChatGPT capabilities to Bing, its Internet search engine. And we know that Microsoft, likewise, is rumored to be bringing similar capabilities to Office. But what about Windows? What about Microsoft’s core platform for personal computing? Surely, AI has a big future there as well.

You bet it does. Let’s look at the history there.

In July 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI with the stated aim of building artificial general intelligence (AGI), including a partnership to build hardware and software platforms within Microsoft Azure that would scale to AGI. Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft became OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner and its preferred partner for commercializing OpenAI’s pre-AGI technologies.

Also in 2019, Microsoft launched the Arm-powered Surface Pro X, which was the first Surface PC to include a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which does for AI what a dedicated graphics chipset, or GPU, does for graphics: it offloads or accelerates AI tasks, freeing the CPU and GPU from what would otherwise be computationally intensive activities that would harm the overall performance or battery life.

The Pro X was a good test bed for this technology since so few were sold and it was still early days for this type of technology. But in 2020, the software giant announced a feature called Eye Contact that uses the Pro X’s NPU to make it look like meeting attendees are always looking directly into their webcams, even when they aren’t. It then expanded on this functionality at an April 2022 hybrid work event, announcing new AI-based Windows 11 features like Voice clarity, Voice focus, Automatic framing, Portrait blur, and Background blur. Collectively, this functionality is now called Windows Studio Effects in Windows 11 22H2.

To help developers get started with this forward-leaning technology, Microsoft released the Windows Dev Kit 2023—previously codenamed Project Volterra—in October 2022. Enthusiasts were mostly excited by the idea of a Mac mini-like Surface PC, but that’s not what this is about: like Surface Pro X, the WDK includes an NPU for hardware-accelerated AI and machine learning workloads. So does the just-released (and Arm-based) Surface Pro 9 5G, the successor to the Pro X.

Microsoft knew that it couldn’t limit the reach of these tools to Arm-based PCs, of course, and it has been working with both Intel and AMD to bring NPUs to their more popular PC hardware platforms as well. Intel is bringing M.2-based AI accelerator modules to its 13th Gen Core desktop chipsets (Raptor Lake), and it will provide native NPU capabilities with its 13th Gen Core mobile chipsets (Meteor Lake) this year.

And then there’s AMD.

At CES 2023 last week, Microsoft executive vice president Panos Panay joined AMD CEO Lisa Su on stage in Las Vegas (this segment starts at about 26:40), which seemed like it could be awkward given that the recently-released Surface Laptop 5 family dropped the AMD chipset option. Granted, Panay is always awkward, and he didn’t disappoint. But he was there to discuss the AMD Ryzen 7040, which will be AMD’s first chipset to integrate AI capabilities on-chip when it ships in March. This chipset will enable AI experiences that include the expected—more lifelike collaboration experiences with enhanced audio and video, for example—but also improvements to content creation, gaming performance, and security.

Wearing platform shoes that would make the members of KISS blush, Panay stumbled in his halting way through cited how the Microsoft/AMD partnership has resulted in such things as the Xbox Series X|S, the addition of the Microsoft Pluton security chipset to AMD silicon, and AMD’s help with Azure. And then he finally hit on AI after being prompted by Su.

“AI is the defining technology of our time,” he said. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s transforming industries, it’s improving our daily lives in many ways, some of it you see, some of it you don’t see, and we are right now … at an inflection point. This is where computing, from the cloud to the edge, is becoming more and more intelligent, more personal, and it’s all done by harnessing the power of AI.”

“AMD has been at the forefront of compute tech for a very long time … driving key innovations,” he continued. “But now AMD is also at the forefront of AMD technology with the Ryzen 7040 series, along with Windows 11. It is our next step in this journey together.” A discussion of Windows Studio Effects, soon to be running on AMD (and Intel) silicon ensued.

So there you go: Microsoft’s current AI innovations in Windows 11 require an NPU, and those innovations today are limited to Arm-based hardware. But this year, they are coming to new Intel- and AMD-based PCs as well. The experiment is becoming a reality.

“AI is going to reinvent how you do everything you do on Windows … quite literally,” Panay continued after a tortured explanation of how the mouse and the scroll wheel did the same for the GUI (these features worked with text-based UIs as well). “These large, generative models, think language models, code gen[eration] models, image models, these models are so powerful, so delightful, so useful, so personal, but they’re also very compute intensive. And so we haven’t been able to do this before. We have never seen this [kind of] intense workloads at this scale before. And so it’s going to require an operating system that blurs the line between the cloud and edge, and that’s what we’re doing right now. And it takes the right silicon in the right place to deliver the best experience for our customers … the next generation of these products is going to inspire a ton.”

Well then. If I’m not mistaken—and to be fair, Brad put this in my head this morning during First Ring Daily—I believe that what Panay just laid out there, in very general terms, is the vision for Windows 12.

Let me explain.

When Microsoft announced Windows 11 in mid-2021, it was clear that this release was not about reinventing the foundation. Instead, it was about simplifying the top-level UI and making it prettier and more like what we experience on mobile. We can quibble about the details—we lost a lot of functionality in that simplification, and the UI changes are literally just skin-deep—but that’s pretty much Windows 11 in a nutshell. Given this, Windows 11 should run as well as its predecessor on the same hardware. But Microsoft artificially limited the availability of Windows 11 to include just a subset of the most recent hardware; basically anything that is using an 8th Gen Intel CPU, or equivalent, or newer.

Windows 12 will be a more profound update, and I have to say, I am delighted to already have a potential refutation of the complaint I made in Tabs … Again (Premium), that Microsoft was no longer doing deep architectural work with Windows but was instead sticking to the surface level stuff. (Indeed, it is perhaps not coincidental that Microsoft’s Windows Core OS Platform team just started a new blog. Perhaps they will have a lot to say this year.)

But like Windows 11, it is possible that Microsoft will limit the availability of Windows 12 to those PCs that include dedicated NPUs. This would much more dramatically reduce the number of devices on which users could upgrade. But perhaps there is a middle ground in which those on older PCs simply don’t get newer AI-based features, or some subset of them, or they just run much, much slower.

So how does this make AI the next wave?

Well, a future AI-infused version of Windows is Windows in name only, a thing that is very much like Windows NT was in 1993. It will run Windows applications, and it will look and work like the Windows we know and love. But architecturally, in this case via a combination of hardware, software, and services, this platform will be a different thing in many ways, and more powerful and scalable than what came before. AI could very possibly power a new generation of Windows innovations on the PC desktop just as it will elsewhere on the web, on mobile, and in the cloud. Its ability to span existing platforms is what makes this possible.

It’s a lot more compelling than VR/AR, not that these things are mutually exclusive. And it’s a lot more promising too. Whether Microsoft will pull a .NET and try to rebrand its products with AI naming—Windows .AI, Office .AI, and so on—is sort of beside the point. But that would be hilarious. And oh so Microsoft.