Microsoft CEO on How New Windows AI Copilot+ PCs Beat Apple's Macs | WSJ

- Apple's done a fantastic job of really innovating

on the Mac, we are gonna outperform them.

- So you feel like you've got Apple now.

- We have a computer for people who love Windows

that they can be very, very proud of.

- Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella

is very excited about his new Windows computers

because they're not just any Windows computers.

Can we call 'em AI-puters?

- (laughs) No, I like Copilot+PC.

- [Joanna] Yes, these Copilot+PCs coming

from Microsoft itself

and others like Lenovo and Dell

have been completely re-engineered for.

- AI, AI, AI, AI, AI as a new input.

- But what even is an AI computer?

Microsoft's latest have new chips and AI software

that can do some cool tricks

without even needing to connect to the internet.

After talking to Nadella

and seeing the new Surface devices in action,

I'll say it looks pretty darn promising.

- Here's the interesting thing, right?

Which is, if you sort of take all of

what we've been talking about with AI,

it all came about because of abundance of compute,

all primarily in the cloud, right?

So, that's what created the GPT-4, for example,

which essentially changed the world.

Now, what happened in the cloud

is going to come to the edge,

and the edge that first needs to be reinvented

before we talk about everything else is the PC.

And so, that's sort of what I think of as the AI PC

or the Copilot+PCs.

- Okay, translation for non-computer scientists.

ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot,

those other generative AI tools you've been using,

the processing happens in the cloud, AKA some data center.

Now, some AI processing will happen right on your computer,

what is called edge computing.

To do this, Microsoft had to add a new chip component.

Pretend I'm not a computer nerd.

What is an NPU?

- It's a neural processing unit.

So, if you wanna build any AI application,

you have to have an accelerator,

just like we have in the cloud,

to be able to run these matrix math multiplications fast

in order to drive AI features.

And that's what the NPU does.

- [Joanna] The NPU joins the CPU and the GPU

in the Copilot+PCs.

But here's the really exciting thing.

- Qualcomm's got a new processor,

which we've optimized Windows for.

The battery lab, I've been using it now.

I mean, it's 22 hours of continuous video playback.

- [Joanna] These Qualcomm Snapdragon X series chips

are based on ARM architecture.

And here's another translation.

These energy efficient chips are more like the ones

in your smartphone than the Intel chips

in your Windows laptop.

A few years ago, Apple transitioned all its Macs

from Intel chips.

- [Speaker] To our own Apple silicon.

- [Joanna] Those chips are based on ARM,

and it made MacBooks really awesome.

- We finally feel we have a very competitive product

between Surface Pro and the Surface laptops.

We have essentially the best specs

when it comes to ARM-based silicon and performance

or the NPU performance.

- Microsoft says the Surfaces

are 58% faster than the MacBook Air with M3

and has 20% longer battery life.

Intel will make Copilot PCs,

but this is a move away from that once tight relationship.

Which system do you use?

- I use the Surface laptop.

- Have you heard the fan go on?

- No.

- See, this is what I'm really hoping for,

a Windows PC that doesn't sound

like it's going to outer space.

(Satya laughs)

- You have it, you got it.

- [Joanna] Okay, but what new AI powers

does the NPU unlock in Windows?

- One of the dreams we've always had

is how do we introduce memory, right?

Photographic memory into what you do on the PC,

and now we have it.

So, it's called Recall.

It's not keyword search, right?

It's semantic search over all your history.

And it's not just about any document.

We can recreate moments from the past essentially.

- Here's how it works.

Windows constantly takes screenshots

of what's on your screen.

Then uses a generative AI model right on the device

along with the NPU to process all that data

and make it searchable, even photos.

I got to try it out.

I searched "brown leather bag."

It came up in visual search.

There's no place on this page

that it says "brown leather bag."

It just knows because it sees this brown leather bag.

There could be this reaction from some people

that this is pretty creepy.

Microsoft is taking screenshots of everything I do.

- Yeah, I mean, that's why

that it can only do it on the edge, right?

So this is, you have to put two things together.

This is my computer, this is my Recall,

and it's all being done locally, right?

So that's the promise.

So, that's one of the reasons why Recall works

as a magical thing,

because I can trust it that it is on my computer.

- You can also restrict Recall from taking screenshots

of certain websites or apps or turn it off entirely.

And it seems to me this whole next wave

of AI computing is gonna be built somewhat around trust.

If we're gonna have AI agents that go out

and do things for us,

why should people trust Microsoft over another company?

- And I think we are at the very early stages

of understanding how our relationship

with AI agents should be shaped by us primarily

because that's the only way to build trust.

If somebody else, this is not a vendor decision.

It's a personal, maybe even spiritual decision

of how we want to, and that's why I don't believe

there's just gonna be one, right?

Because I may have multiple agents

that I may want to delegate different types of things to.

- [Joanna] There's another AI feature called Co-creator

that runs locally right on the device.

- How do we really take good old paint

and say, "Hey, I'm not just painting myself,

but I'm able to co-create with an AI."

- You put in a text prompt, "a Windows XP wallpaper

with a big green mountain,"

then start drawing

and a stable diffusion image generation model

right on the device starts to generate an image

based on your sketch.

Yes, that's very good.

There's local live translation, too.

It can translate live video calls

or in-person conversations

from 44 different languages into English.

And it's fast.

(woman speaking foreign language)

Yeah, I have a dog.

(woman speaking foreign language)

Browser.

All of this is powered by small language models

that are stored on the device.

Large language models like chatGPT or Copilot

still run in the cloud.

In the coming weeks,

Copilot will get open AI's latest GPT-4.0 model.

- It's kind of like a new browser effectively.

So, it's right there.

It sees the screen, it sees the world, it hears you.

And so, it's kind of like that personal agent

that's always there that you wanna talk to.

You can interrupt it.

It can interrupt you.

- The new Surfaces will start shipping in June,

starting at 999.

But I had a few more questions about the future.

AI is this new type of way of interacting with computers.

Yet here you're releasing a pretty traditional looking

type of computer.

- You know, think about what we did back in the day

when the internet happened.

It sort of like, the browser was born on Windows

and it went beyond Windows.

That's, I think, what's gonna happen.

That's why I think we want

to make sure we build the Copilot+PC

that's optimized for Copilot.

But I fully expect the Copilot to be everywhere.

And the innovation of the interface of your personal agent,

how I interact with it, how it accesses memories,

how it does actions is gonna be everywhere.

It's gonna be ambient.

- Where else could it go?

- It'll go on the phone, right?

I'll use it on WhatsApp.

I'll use it on any other messaging platform.

It'll be on speakers everywhere.

So, in some sense, it'll be anywhere

users want to interact with it

with different modalities, right?

If you take what GPTO showed

and you combine it with Copilot as the interface,

for us, that's the type of magic that we wanna bring.

First to Windows and everywhere else.

- What do you think about glasses?

- Well, we loved glasses for a long time.

In fact, one of the things that we will do with Meta

is to take Copilot

and really bring it to all of the work that they're doing.

- Can we close our eyes together

and we're gonna imagine

the future of computing. - Okay.

- What is the future that you see?

- The future I see is a computer that understands me

versus a computer that I have to understand.

- Okay, does it look like this?

- It reminds me of XP.

- This is what it turned it into.

- Oh wow.

- Could this be the wallpaper of the future PC?

- It definitely can be.

And you have the power to do it, Joanna.

You can set your wallpaper on Windows.

- Well, I wanna leave this with you

and maybe you can make this the default in Windows 12.

- Thank you so much.