Microsoft's new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft's new era of AI PCs will need a Copilot key, says Intel

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“Copilot key” refers to a physical key on a keyboard. Not some sort of product key burned into the CPU or a licensing dongle. That later was what I initially thought based on the title.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

That was my first take as well, what a world.

Unrelated but it's interesting how english uses the same word to refer to what in spanish could be "clave", "llave" and "tecla" all vastly distinct specialisations of a "key".

It’s no wonder. English isn’t known for its expressiveness. That’s one of the many reasons why it’s commonly used in the tech industry for defining reserved keywords in programming languages; its simplicity compared to other languages makes it ideal for that purpose.

isn't english one of the most expressive languages out there...? has an explicit word for most concepts. its just a bit fuzzy on the top 2000 words.

I don't think so. To begin with, you have no real grammar modes or inflection. Also lots of concepts are merged into shared words.

Some examples: Some languages have two verbs for the state of being, "ser", "estar" which mean different things, you can be cold, or you can _be_ cold. The key example from before. English relies heavily on explicitness which makes it less expressive (less context per word), you cant just say "ate" you need to say "they ate".

Citation needed?

English has one of the largest vocabularies of any language (depends on how you measure, what counts as a word is a complicated question...) and it's just as expressive as anything else.

It's used in tech because it's the default language and it's spoken by the default country, not because of any metaphisical property of the language itself...

Tokens in the concrete syntax of formal languages are just placeholders, you could use arbitrary symbols instead and the abstract syntax wouldn't change.

This seems strange to me, but given at least 2 others did the same... maybe I'm the strange one!

This cleared up the confusion. I was expecting to come to the comments to read an endless string of F-bombs about some Microsoft Copilot license key burnt into the hardware.

It feels like AI in an OS is going to be the next Internet Explorer. MS are going to bundle their version with special hooks and integrations and it's going to be impossible to completely remove or replace theirs with any other models and/or they will suffer from an inferior experience. All while I'm not even sure I want this future they're trying to sell me.

Don't forget to mention the non-optional telemetry, as well. Safe, secure, and encrypted at Microsoft, and only shared with "key partners" to "improve" your experience.

I mean, these days pretty much every corner of Windows is an “inferior experience”, full of ads, confusing design that blurs the distinction between the local machine and the cloud, nonsensical regressive UI changes, and leaky widgets from Windows 3 and Windows 95 that still crop up. No one in charge at Microsoft can figure out how to actually improve their OS, and they are hoping “AI” is the answer. It isn’t.

How else do you expect them to increase quarterly profits?

Cortana was pretty much already that though! It had mercifully mostly been removed, but I guess it’s time for round 2.

The Windows key is a recent addition to the PC keyboard layouts: there are many Model M keyboards with Windows-key-sized gaps in their lower rows.

I'll be interested to see how the mechanical keyboard community reacts to this once these keyboards are ubiquitous. The Signature Plastics keycaps on my keyboard have the legend SYSTEM on the Windows key (or Super key, since I don't use Windows): how will this evolve?

> Windows key is a recent addition

Looks like it was introduced in 1994; unix epoch starts @ 1 January 1970; so we've had a Windows key for ~55% of the existence of standard epoch time.

The Model M was introduced ~1984; so Windows key has been around for ~75% of it's lifespan.

I was going to say, I don't even have a windows key yet.

The Copilot key is essentially a rebranding and takeover of the context menu key. Besides a new label for the keycap and maybe a different key mapping it won't effect much. It'll probably have a bigger impact on ThinkPads that will have to move Print Screen again.

> The Copilot key is essentially a rebranding and takeover of the context menu key.

The...what?

I mean, I know what it is, but I haven't seen a keyboard with one in a while; my Microsoft ergonomic wireless keyboard has the Fn key where it would normally be, and my Alienware laptop has a windows-key-disabling-lock-key there, and my Dell Vostro sacrifices the space to make room for having both arrow keys and a numeric pad on a laptop.

So, in practice, I think this is going to be an extra key to fit in, not a repurposing, because you can't repurpose what doesn't exist.

> I mean, I know what it is, but I haven't seen a keyboard with one in a while

Logitech keyboards have them.

It's the context menu key spot. It's often co-opted these days (especially on laptops) but if you look at the new Surface Laptop 6 or Surface Pro 10 keyboard the context menu key of the Surface Laptop 5 or prior SP Type Covers has been replaced by the copilot key. It even looks like the context menu key now on the Fn layer. I wouldn't be surprised if MS says to partners it HAS to be there next to alt.

You can clearly see it's position completely replacing the old context menu key in the image of the new boldset SP type cover in this recent blogpost: https://blogs.windows.com/devices/2024/03/21/introducing-sur...

> It’s the context menu key spot.

I’m not denying its a spot that exists; I’m saying lots of existing keyboards already replace the context menu key with something else viewed as more important, so that, whatever the preferred spot was previously called, what the actual tradeoff for the the AI certification is often won’t be the context menu key.

A ridiculous trend of course, but look on the bright side: a new spare key to remap to whatever you want!

Is Microsoft putting a local model onto each Windows 11 install now? Would an Intel NPU built into Intel's CPUs make copilot perform better? I though Copilot was exclusively ran through a Bing i-frame-esque window in Windows 11?

Unless they're planning to make locally run AI models that will take advantage of Intel's NPU's in the future and this is a step to prepare for it?

Very interesting.

As far as I can tell from the current preview releases, the Copilot stuff still runs in the cloud, and it would be infeasible to run a general GPT-like chatbot on consumer PC hardware for a good while.

I imagine the NPU stuff is for assist with misc local AI/ML tasks, like photo editing and typing auto-correct ala what Apple's doing with their OSes.

> it would be infeasible to run a general GPT-like chatbot on consumer PC hardware for a good while.

It's lower quality and slower than cloud, but I can run ollama on my aging laptops today; I wouldn't be surprised if the addition of hardware acceleration allowed new PCs to run a chatbot locally.

You can run Ollama on your aging laptop today, but at how many tokens per second and at how many parameters? Most consumer PC hardware isn't going to have a very capable GPU. But, I certainly anticipate "AI accelerators" in consumer PCs, in the short term, ala AI PC NPUs.

FWIW, I basically leave Ollama running on my M3 Max and 24/7 and use it regularly, and it's ridiculously fast, but: M3 Max with lots of RAM and a crazy memory busy.

Knowing Microsoft's history, their intent is to suck up all of our Copilot chat history and responses. They will slowly get enough information about us where they even simulate a virtual clone of our online activity.

Tangential question: is there any indication that PC hardware or the x64 will be adopting unified memory with an ultra-fast bus to the CPU, for general purpose computing in the near future?

(Yes, I am aware of the AMD UMA stuff, but it looks to me like special purpose stuff.)

I honestly pray for the day PC gaming works 99% on Linux. I hate Windows 11, it prompts me every 3 days to setup my Microsoft account and then every update it reinstalls OneDrive and the list of bull shit it included by default is over 300 items long.

Thankfully the Steam deck seems to have accelerated progress in this regard, but its still a long way to go, specifically multiplayer shooters.

Maybe we are already 97% or something. I don't have games left anymore which I want to play and don't work in Linux. But of course, very limited perspective. Anti-cheat engines are the biggest problems still, while EAC and BattleEye are natively supported already.

I think we’re at 90% right now.

I’ve been gaming on Linux (both retro and new games) for the past 3 or 4 years and the vast majority run with either no or minimal, identical config.

Do they perform the same as they would on Windows though? No FPS loss for example?

It's been a while since I paid attention, but when I last looked it was a spread; some games were slower on Linux, but some were faster.

I’ve not noticed a difference.

I did gpu pass through to a windows vm to test a while ago and didn’t get any major difference in fps.

I mean, other than very old games (try running Sid Meier's Pirates under proton! it's barely playable) and user-hostile games (if the developers use anticheats which block Linux on purpose, that's not really Linux's fault) we are at least 95% of the way there.

Sure, there will always be someone who will complain that "Valorant doesn't run on Linux" but the overwhelming majority of games do.

The plans of the Riot Games are not promising. Their new anti-cheat engine is going to run on Kernel level and log everything from the computer, and uploads this information who knows where.

It's getting dramatically better partially due to the steamdeck since it runs Linux. Some games might not still work in the future though due to kernel level anticheats mostly only supporting windows.

Maybe they will add Linux support in the future (for better or worse)

A non starter right out the gate for me

Really? PC users need a fully-dedicated physical key for more AI bullshit because it wouldn't be enough to just macro it with WIN+<key> or key-chord it? It would be detrimental to PC users' lives if they had to put slightly more effort to activate some gimmick AI feature?

Imagine if a physical key dedicated to bringing up Clippy was added.

Yeah, because they need to advertise it as much as possible to get people subscribed and using it. By abusing the certification process pretty much every OEM realistically needs to go through they can get near free advertising for a feature that can generate much revenue.

This is so ridiculous, I can’t wait for this trend to pass.

me too but i reckon its gunna take some self-owns before anyone is willing to openly admit they were wrong and dismantle their snake oil prompts

"The internet is a fad".

Odd seeing sentiments like that here, always really amusing the extreme irony.

And 3D (with or without special glasses) was a fad. You can't judge all new hype on the handful of things that actually were as big of a deal as they could have been.

To the extent that the technologies called "AI" are useful, they won't be summoned by a dedicated button on a keyboard, and they won't come because companies desperate for relevance shove it in every corner of the user experience, even where it doesn't belong, long before the technology is actually ready. The trend I'm bemoaning is pasting "AI" on everything and pretending it adds value because it's "AI".

when did intel get into the keyboard business?

ohhh a key on the keyboard.

Can we just have Meta, Super, and Hyper keys instead?

Or just a full on Space Cadet keyboard.

EU should look into preventing this. Also Netflix buttons on remotes should be illegal.

There needs to be level playing field /s

this but not sarcastically

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