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Can somebody give me a TLDR on what the "copilot button" does? I've never had one of those laptops and have never understood that. Does it just start the AI front-end? Does it power up the NPU?

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It is just a button. Default it starts the Copilot app which is really the Office app that already existed but now with the copilot tab preselected. Also that Copilot runs in the cloud and doesn't use your NPU.

The only thing until now I've found using the NPU are the built in blur, auto frame and eye focus modes for the webcam.

I got one of those Asus ROG laptops that bragged about having an NPU and I kept trying to figure out how to access it until I realized they just meant the integrated Ryzen GPU (which is also responsible for getting anything rendered by the discrete Nvidia GPU to the actual display). Also its alleged 16G of video memory included a mapped 8G of system RAM. I miss when vendors at least pretended to be honest.

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