2y ago

Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud

www.theverge.com Microsoft wants to move Windows fully to the cloud

You might boot laptops straight into a cloud OS in the future

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Microsoft has recently announced Windows Copilot, an AI-powered assistant for Windows 11. Windows Copilot sits at the side of Windows 11, and can summarize content you’re viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. Microsoft is currently testing this internally and promised to release it to testers in June before rolling it out more broadly to Windows 11 users.
Assuming this will use OpenAI API like other Microsoft's AI products, this is going to be expensive to operate. Subsidizing it indefinitely is surely not an option. How would Microsoft monetize it? By charging subscription like GitHub Copilot, or monetizing it somehow using users data they collected? I assume it would be the latter.
- There's talk about Microsoft SoCs on their own products, much like Apple does the M1 SoCs.
  These Microsoft SoCs would be used in Surface devices and likely have dedicated AI hardware. Again, much like Apple.
  If we're talking about specialized models, not one generic LLM for everything a la GPT4, they might not have to be THAT big and could run on reasonably powerful devices.
  
  I really doubt that, at least for the next few years. "AI Assistant" usually means LLMs, and even M2 struggles to run them mostly due to large compute and RAM requirements. If Microsoft could somehow release a truly local AI assistant feature that can run on average windows users' hardware, that would be shake the whole ML field.
  
  True, but they could get the base requirements of a task using OpenAI and then use specialized models locally to do subtasks.
  Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI, they don't need to pay nearly as much per request as we do and the cost will likely decrease over time too.

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