Future versions of Windows will be AI-powered
A future version of Windows will be deeply integrated with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, Neowin reports.
Microsoft executive vice president and chief product officer Panos Panay recently revealed as much during a discussion with AMD CEO Lisa Su at CES 2023 earlier in January.
The pair spoke about the new AI engine in AMD’s Ryzen 7040 chips, the first x86 processors to feature a dedicated on-chip AI engine.
Panay said technology like this would enable Microsoft to build AI-powered software, which required a huge amount of compute power.
Panay also said that the industry was at an inflexion point when it came to AI, which he labelled the defining technology of our time.
“It’s like nothing I have ever seen before. It’s transforming industries, it’s improving our daily lives in many ways — some of it you see, some of it you don’t see,” said Panay.
According to Panay, AI was going to reinvent how people do “quite literally”, “everything” on Windows.
He mentioned several types of AI systems that could be baked into a new version of Windows, including large generative models for language, coding, and imagery.
“These models are so powerful, so delightful, so useful, personal, but they are also very compute-intensive, and so we haven’t been able to do this before,” Panay said.
Panos Panay, Microsoft executive vice president and chief product officer
Panay added that harnessing AI’s power would require an operating system that blurred the line between cloud and edge computing, which is what Microsoft was currently developing.
It’s unclear whether Panay was referring to Windows 12 or a later version of the operating system.
Reports suggest that the company is already planning to roll out the former in either 2024 or 2025, which would be barely 4-5 years after the launch of Windows 11.
Panay’s comments come on the back of a Bloomberg report that Microsoft was considering an investment of as much as $10 billion (R168 billion) in OpenAI, the research laboratory behind ChatGPT.
Microsoft previously invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, as part of a joint initiative to develop supercomputing technologies.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has gone viral since launching as a prototype at the end of November 2022, with many users praising its detailed responses and apparent knowledgeability on various topics.
However, others have highlighted concerns that ChatGPT can also very confidently give wrong answers to questions.
ChatGPT runs on OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and is continuously fine-tuned through human supervision and reinforcement learning techniques.
Microsoft is also reportedly working on integrating ChatGPT with its Bing search engine, a move that some experts reckon could lure users away from Google Search, presenting a significant threat to the latter’s business.
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