The Buzz Around AI PCs: What’s Really New?

What in the world is an AI PC?

ChatGPT heralded the era of AI – it also forced a lot of companies to re-look at the way they market their products. From search engines, operating systems to chip makers. A new “industry” was born – or should we say – new marketing buzzwords were invented. 

Looking back even up to 10 years – AI was always all around us. Intelligent routing in google maps, autocomplete on google search or youtube – Heck even the way Netflix suggested movies. We’ve always had a digital spouse who butts in to complete our sentences. And lets not forget the all knowing social media algorithms which are pretty good at reinforcing our biases in the content presented – and now even in the comment sections

Plenty of resources to suggest how AI has been influencing consumers and products this last decade. Netflix has been fine tuning how thumbnails for movie suggestions are updated in real time based on viewer “profile” – and that’s just scratching the surface.

So in all of this – we find ourselves bombarded with messaging on AI PCs, AI on mobile devices – on your operating systems – the works. The question arises – why ?

“Paise ka chakkar hai baabu bhaiyya” – in other words – Follow the money. 

So what do these AI enabled operating systems, chips and services do ? The short answer is not much really – stuff like this has been working on our devices for over a decade now. The long answer is slightly complicated. Earlier – most of the AI magic used to happen on cloud – which in itself has been quite seamless – the shift has been subtle and has been taking place for the past few years. Simple stuff like predictive text input on your smartphones – categorizing images by face, location type and events.

The big shift that’s been happening recently is the promise of running smaller sized pre-trained models on your desktops and phones. The chip design has changed with “neural engines” , “tensor cores” and what not. A decent Nvidia GPU in your system can help you generate images LOCALLY, allows you to “chat” with your system files – search for information, ask questions. Microsoft has been updating their OS to have more and more features which are “AI Enabled”. So is this really old wine in a shiny new bottle ? Absolutely yes. It makes us wish we were still kids – HOMEWORK would’ve been so much easier !

The “feature” set for these computing devices is only limited by our imagination – we’re not far away from the day when programmers would code simply using “Natural Language” – imagine a world where complex programming happens just by dictation – working without error or flaws. Imagine the changes to curriculum, careers and even industries. 

Exciting times ahead.