2024 will be a critical year for Windows and Microsoft. The Redmond company managed to get ahead of the AI market thanks to its $1 million investment in OpenAI, which allowed it to implement Copilot, based on the same language model than ChatGPT.
In the same way that Google I/O focused on Gemini, the next Microsoft event which will be held in Seattle on May 20 focus on Copilot. Therefore, all “software” and “hardware” news will have something to do with AI, and leaks indicate that there are a lot of them.
To start, Windows 11. Finally, this year there will not be the launch of Windows 12, as initially rumored, but rather a major update of Windows 11 which will bring excellent news: AI Explorer. That’s the code name Microsoft developers use for a set of AI-based tools that can change the way we use computers.
AI Explorer will constantly use artificial intelligence in the background, allowing it to learn from our actions and help us at all times. For example, one of the most prominent functions will be “Recall”, which will allow you to “travel to the past” and check everything we did on the computer; Thanks to this, Copilot will be able to answer questions related to any event and application.
Windows CenterHe gives a very curious example. If before we were talking about movies with a friend on WhatsApp, we can ask the AI to show us the list of movies that this person wanted to see. The reminder will be able to show the exact moment this conversation took placeproviding context to the response.
AI Explorer will also be able to analyze what is happening on the screen to offer suggestions according to the context. For example, if we view two web pages side by side, AI Explorer will offer us a comparison. And if we are viewing an image, AI Explorer can suggest us to remove the background. These functions are activated with just one click, so you don’t need to write “prompts” into the box like Copilot. Therefore, AI Explorer could be the evolution of personal assistants, after Cortana died without much fanfare.
Windows will also benefit from AI features in all types of programs, such as automatic subtitles if we watch a YouTube video in Edge, for example. Windows Studio will also benefit from real-time filters on the video you get from the webcam.
Some of these functions will depend on an external server, as Copilot currently does, but others They will run locally on the computer itself; This will make it more secure and private, which is especially important in functions that record literally everything we do. However, at the moment it is unclear which features will be local, although Copilot is expected to be partially local later in the year with an update.
In order to use AI locally, a new processor with NPU will be needed, and this is where the second big announcement of the presentation will come: the new Surface. Specifically, a lot of expectations are placed on the new Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 based on Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X processor.
Qualcomm and Microsoft claim that these ARM processors are capable of fighting Apple’s chips head to head, and to surpass the latest Intel Core Ultra in performance. Additionally, they all come with the NPU needed to run the AI locally. Therefore, the big surprise of the evening could come with the announcement that Microsoft will ditch Intel and start offering Surface devices powered only by the Snapdragon X processor.
