IS THIS THE WEEK MICROSOFT UNVEILS ITS AI-BOOSTED PCs?

Microsoft has a special event in Seattle, kicking off its regular Build conference, an event aimed at developers and coders, and the tech world is abuzz with rumors about what the software giant is expected to reveal. Microsoft has relentlessly touted its all-aboard status on the AI bandwagon, publicizing how it has injected artificial intelligence smarts into every part of the Windows experience, from keyboard buttons through to business software. So on Tuesday, it's all but certain that "AI" will be the most-uttered word. And since your office computers are most likely powered by Windows, this means tomorrow's event will most likely show the way you and your co-workers will be using PCs soon. AI in Microsoft hardware Microsoft's been touting the future "AI PC" concept for a while, in concert with its long-term partner Intel, whose "Intel Inside" stickers have adorned billions of PC cases for decades, so it's reasonable to expect the software giant will have more to say about this concept. Microsoft's pitch borrows more than a few ideas from Apple, which has quietly been building specialty AI processing systems into its custom-made processors for Macs, iPhones, and iPads for several years and then tightly integrating these AI processors with what its software can do. Technically, an AI PC will require the computer's motherboard to have a special "neural processing unit" built in. This "NPU" is a tiny cluster of processor power designed specially for the kind of math that makes AI systems like recognition work extra-fast. We can expect Microsoft to tout the promise of AI-equipped PCs, in an effort to tempt regular users as well as business buyers to purchase them in the near future. Until now, Microsoft's been quiet about what exactly they can do, though Intel has indicated that tricks like speech recognition (to boost digital assistant systems), real-time image processing to polish up video calls, and other features, like auto-recognizing features in photos to help you edit them, could feature prominently. Microsoft will likely spend a lot of time promoting its own Surface laptops and tablet devices, as well as putting its Windows operating system on so-called Arm chips, according to tech news site Windows Central. These chips are a much more power-efficient processor rival to the kind of silicon chip Intel and others make for typical PCs. Microsoft's Surface devices have long been praised for their "premium" arty design, in contrast to traditionally clunky PCs, and the new crop will likely be pitched as rivals to Apple's power-efficient MacBooks and powerful iPad Pros, and a way for Microsoft to show off its AI systems on hardware optimized for it. AI in Microsoft software Microsoft-watchers at Windows Central report that the company's "AI Explorer" may be one of the big stars of the event, with a feature named "Recall" as the most dramatic demonstration of how AI will change everyone's computing experience. Recall relies on the neural processing unit running all the time, carefully keeping an eye on what you've been working on on your PC desktop. In a busy work session, perhaps with multiple documents and spreadsheets and so on all open at once, this could help you find that one tricky thing you've lost track of, via a natural-language search, or come up with suggestions about text to write, charts to build for data, and so on--similar to some of the real-time work-watching powers OpenAI revealed last week with its new ChatGPT GPT-4o model. Recall will also let you rewind your work session back to a specific moment, perhaps so that you can change your mind about a particular decision. The concept sounds like it really may save people time at work, though there's no word on whether it'll solve the classic "Windows crashed before you could save your work" error that has generated trillions of curse words shouted across offices for decades, all without any AI assistance. AI critics will worry about the security aspects of this technology, especially against the background of security worries around Microsoft's flagship Copilot AI service. But if Microsoft is savvy about the privacy risks of its users, Recall may work mostly offline, sending no AI data into the cloud where it could leak out. In fact, Microsoft is expected to show off on-device AI processing tomorrow too, with some Copilot capabilities that are currently processed in the cloud being carried out on the PCs' own chips. BY KIT EATON @KITEATON