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-bas...