Before you buy a Windows 11 'AI PC' in 2024, read this
Before you buy a Windows 11 'AI PC' in 2024, read this
he AI PC hype is building to a fever pitch after CES 2024, but here's the truth: if you're hoping to be blown away by what these computers can do, you need to temper expectations.
Thu 18 - Jan - 2024 530 0
AI PCs” were everywhere at CES 2024 last week, and companies like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm are all touting how great their hardware is at running AI tasks. As Microsoft put it, this is “the year of AI-powered Windows PCs.”
But since these “AI PCs” are already on shelves and you can buy them right now, we need to cut through the hype and focus on what you’re getting for your money.
Spoiler alert: These PCs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and if you’re expecting something transformative when you buy one at the start of 2024, you’re going to be disappointed. They might one day deliver a lot of cool features — just not yet.
Let’s talk about what’s actually going on — and why, even if you’re passionate about generative AI (genAI), you should be skipping this wave of AI-accelerating chips and turning to different hardware entirely — hardware you may already own!
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Current AI isn’t happening on your computer
Before wrapping your head around the details here, it’s important to realize what’s going on with most current genAI tools. When you use Copilot on Windows 11, pull up ChatGPT, turn to Adobe Firefly to generate images, or interact with similar popular genAI tools, the work isn’t actually being done on your computer.
Instead, all that processing is happening in a data center somewhere — incredibly powerful computers are using a lot of resources and electricity to run the AI model and generate an image of a dog having a birthday party or a response to your question.
You can do a lot of this locally on your computer — witness open-source tools such as the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model or the LLAMA large language model. But, to get good results, you’ll generally need a PC with solid processing power. In particular, you’ll need a very fast GPU — the same kind of hardware that people were recently using to mine cryptocurrencies.
The dream is a mainstream PC that can run these genAI models locally, on your own hardware — with no data sent to a central processing center. But not everything is going to start happening on your PC overnight. We’re moving toward a more “hybrid” future, where the most demanding tasks are sent to data centers and simpler tasks that deliver contextual suggestions and help you rewrite that email take place on your computer.
Microsoft
Even on an “AI PC” with a fancy Copilot key, Copilot works exactly the same as on other PCs, with all the work happening in Microsoft’s data centers.
The promise of neural processing units (NPUs)
We’re all talking about AI PCs thanks to recent hardware advances — specifically, the addition of a “neural processing unit” (NPU) in Intel’s newest Meteor Lake chips and recent AMD chips.
The promise is that these NPUs are dedicated, low-power hardware that can locally run genAI models and accelerate AI processing. The idea is that soon every PC you buy will have an NPU. They won’t use much power, so the genAI tasks can run in the background even on battery power.
PC makers aren’t alone here. Do you have a Google Pixel 8 or Pixel 8 Pro phone? Google’s Tensor G3 chip does something similar — in fact, Google says it ”[paves] the way for on-device generative AI.” In the real world, it enables AI features such as summarizing audio in the Recorder app and generating smart replies in the Gboard keyboard.
