I asked a Copilot+ PC to make me a beach ball, he gave me what I needed if not what I wanted
The new era of CoPilot+ PCs is upon us, showing up at your local Best Buy with a slew of laptops all designed to handle AI tasks locally.
To be clear, there are two classes of these new AI PCs. They all have a new, almost indescribable Copilot keyboard button (it doesn’t look like a copilot on an airplane at all), but only Copilot+ PCs with new Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite or X Plus chips are ready to run a variety of local AI perform tricks and tasks.
On June 18, 2024 – the official launch day – I took the subway to a huge Best Buy to see, touch, and play with all those new Copilot+ PCs. There are many. Five manufacturers are introducing these laptops, including Lenovo, Samsung, HP, Dell and Microsoft.
That’s notable because I don’t remember ever seeing so many new Windows laptops that didn’t have Intel or at least AMD chips.
There are plenty of signatures to let you know you’ve entered the land of Copilot PCs, but if that’s not enough, each Copilot+ laptop is denoted by a colored placemat underneath.
You may also notice an almost “Intel Inside” style sticker on the palm rest portion of each of these wearables. Qualcomm is not taking any risks here. These are ARM based and not X86 systems.
Each of the laptops is fairly locked down in terms of the range of AI experience. In fact, Windows Recall is listed as “Coming Soon”, but you can start playing with Windows Creator and Windows Studio right away.
I decided to try on both a Lenovo Yoga and a Microsoft Surface Pro 10. The real fun is launching Task Manager alongside the interactive demo. When I clicked on ‘Performance’ I could see the load on every piece of silicon: CPU, GPU and especially the new NPU (Neural Processing Unit), designed to intervene and handle local AI requests.
I opened Windows Studio and selected the live filter that made me look like a cartoon character. The NPU performance bar rose immediately, but as soon as I left Studio the NPU workload dropped to virtually zero.
Later I opened Windows Creator (Painter on AI steroids) and used the mouse to draw a rudimentary tree. In a prompt box next to it, I asked him to make it into a beautiful tree. The NPU spiked and within seconds a space above my prompt was filled with a beautiful illustration of a tree.
It is still in its infancy and these systems are far from foolproof. At one point, many of the new Copilot+ PCs in the store announced that they were downloading new AI updates (new models, I assume) and couldn’t process queries.
At another point I asked Windows Creator to turn a doodle of a ball and a few lines into a beach ball on the beach. First, it generated something that looked like an egg. I had to set the ‘Creativity slider’ to 100% to get a beach ball, but it was never on the beach.
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This may seem like a problem, but the goal of useful AI shouldn’t be to do everything for you; instead, it is intended to support and perhaps spark creativity. I could imagine taking that ball and dropping it into my own illustration of the ocean.
Many questions remain about how ready we are to have AI available not only on the best chatbot apps and websites (you can access the web-based Copilot via the button on non-“+” PCs), but as an integral part from our computers.
Microsoft’s updated Windows 11 with Copilot, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, and countless new laptops running them represent a new chapter in the era of personal computing. I don’t know if this is what we want, but if you find the time to go to your local PC store and try them out, I encourage you to do so.
You may be surprised at what you find. Enjoy this first summer of the AI PC.
