What exactly is an 'AI' PC?

AI, EVERYWHERE, all at once. That, in a nutshell, is what's happening to the computing industry. The PC, inevitably, is not immune. Later this summer, you'll be able to buy a machine that officially qualifies as an 'Al' PC, according to no lesser an authority than Microsoft. But you might be surprised at who's making it.

- Jeremy Laird

The whole AI industry is, slightly ironically, tricky to compute. What does ‘AI’ actually mean? When do a few clever algorithms and a dash of pattern spotting actually become artificial intelligence in a meaningful sense?

Right now, there’s debate over the possibility of sentience of the latest chatbots. Personally, I don’t think text prediction amounts to intelligence, much less sentience. Large language models are meant to do a convincing job of predicting text, and do just that, which is not cause to impute some mysterious higher function emerging out of nothing.

That may happen eventually. In the meantime, we have the term ‘AI’ plastered all over everything. Later this year, that will include the PC. Microsoft is obviously one of the most important players in PC tech, so what it determines should make for an AI PC will become something of a de facto standard.