More and more PC vendors are beginning to realize the huge potential of AI to improve user experience and work efficiency. Text: Technode
作者|黄尘排版|Miziko
This article is expected to take 8 minutes to read
At the recent spring press conference, Huawei's new MateBook X Pro attracted attention because of its weight of less than 1kg. TechNode, on the other hand, has set its sights on upgrading the AI experience of the product. Huawei's new MateBook X Pro applies the Pangu model for the first time, empowering Huawei PCs in all scenarios.
Coincidentally, Yang Yuanqing, Chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, announced at Lenovo Group's 2024/2025 Fiscal Year Pledge Conference that it will hold the Tech World Lenovo Innovation and Technology Conference in Shanghai in the near future, and take the lead in releasing a truly meaningful AI PC with five characteristics in the Chinese market. AI PCs provide a new growth point for PC manufacturers.
Manufacturers are scrambling to lay out
More and more PC vendors are beginning to realize the huge potential of AI to improve user experience and work efficiency. As a result, they are accelerating the development and promotion of AI-enabled PC products in order to gain a favorable position in the future market competition. For example, Huawei's Pangu model was officially unveiled to the public in the first half of 2021, mainly for specific industrial scenarios such as medicine, mining, and scientific computing. After some of the capabilities of Pangu NLP, CV and multimodal models were added to Huawei's mobile phones and HarmonyOS Zhixing's cars, the AI capabilities of its voice assistant "Xiaoyi" have been greatly improved. HUAWEI Mate 60 series' all-new Xiaoyi is supported by Pangu large model technology, which can better understand users and provide more accurate feedback, such as native digital content search, dialogue recognition screen content, help users quickly summarize, copywriting content assistance, and image secondary creation. On the all-new MateBook X Pro, the AI summary function can quickly and accurately extract key information from text, audio, and video content, helping users quickly and accurately filter out valuable content from massive information, thus helping users grasp the key points of the meeting more efficiently.
It is equipped with the AI space function for the first time, with the help of which users can directly access rich AI applications with one click, and supports 100+ agents, which is a one-stop AI capability aggregation entrance, which can make code programming, PPT production, paper reading and typesetting, collection of learning materials, video and picture creation, travel planning and other scenarios more efficient and convenient.
On the evening of March 4, Apple officially launched the MacBook Air with M3 chip, and in a press release on Apple's official website in the United States, Apple boldly declared the new MacBook Air "The world's best consumer laptop for AI". Not only that, some foreign media said that Apple will announce a series of new artificial intelligence features covering all its platforms at WWDC 2024.
To further boost sluggish PC sales, Apple also intends to overhaul its entire Mac lineup by highlighting a new internal architecture (M4 chip) that supports artificial intelligence. According to Mark Gurman, who often breaks Apple's messages, there will be at least three major versions of the next-generation M4 chip, and Apple hopes to use it to update different Mac models. Among them, Apple plans to update the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air from the end of this year until the beginning of next year, both equipped with M4 chips.
The M4 chip family includes an entry-level version called Donan, a more powerful model called Brava, and a high-end processor codenamed Hidra. Apple plans to highlight the AI processing power of these components and how they will integrate with the next version of macOS, which will be announced at WWDC 2024 in June.
AI has landed on the device side, but it is still in its infancy
At present, chip companies such as Intel and Qualcomm provide core technical support for AI PCs by launching processors with AI functions, while traditional PC manufacturers such as Lenovo and Dell are cooperating with chip companies to launch PC products equipped with AI technology to meet consumer needs.
Intel believes that the so-called AI PC is a PC that can play with AI functions. AI can fundamentally change and reshape the user experience of PCs and unleash people's productivity and creativity through close collaboration between the cloud and PCs, or by running large language models independently on PCs.
The device-side large-scale model service can provide faster response speed, better privacy protection, higher flexibility, and reliability, while also saving bandwidth, reducing energy consumption, and providing customized services. However, on-device deployments also face challenges such as storage space, computing power, and maintenance updates, so there are trade-offs to be made based on specific application scenarios and needs.
Southwest Securities Research Report pointed out that smart devices are the carrier of artificial intelligence to reach users, and AI PC will deeply transform the PC industry. The rapid development of generative AI and LLM has profoundly changed the way people live and work, and accelerated the intelligent transformation of all walks of life. AI development is shifting from software-led to hardware + software parallel drive, and smart devices, as the ultimate carrier for AI to reach users, are becoming an important breakthrough in the future development and implementation of AI. AI PC combines AI models with PCs to bring innovations in architecture design, interaction methods, content, and application ecology, which will deeply transform the PC industry.
According to Canalys, AI PCs are bringing "significant opportunities" to the industry: global AI PC shipments will account for 18% of total PC shipments to 48 million units in 2024, and 205 million AI PC shipments by 2028, with a compound annual growth rate of 44% over the next five years.
Despite this, Liang Zhenpeng, a senior industrial economic observer, said that the application of AI technology in the field of personal computers is still in its infancy, and how to achieve more efficient and intelligent technology has become an urgent problem for the industry to solve. For example, in the AI PC market, how to win the favor of consumers through product innovation and differentiated competition; moreover, consumers' awareness and acceptance of AI PC still need to be improved, and the market demand may not be enough to support the rapid development of the industry; in addition, the lack of unified standards in the AI PC industry may lead to poor coordination between all links in the industrial chain; finally, with the application of AI technology in personal computers, how to ensure user privacy and data security has become a problem that the industry needs to pay attention to.
epilogue
With the continuous advancement of AI technology and the increasing demand for personal computing, AI PCs are gradually becoming a key force in driving the innovation of the PC industry. The active layout of manufacturers such as Huawei and Lenovo, as well as Apple's bold declaration on the M3 series of Macs, all indicate that AI PCs will become an important trend in personal computing in the future. Although the development of AI PCs is still in its infancy, facing challenges such as technology implementation, market education, industry standards, and privacy protection, AI PCs are expected to bring users a more intelligent and personalized computing experience as the technology matures and the ecosystem improves.
In this new field full of opportunities and challenges, only those companies and brands that can foresee the future, continue to innovate and actively respond to market changes can be invincible in the wave of AI PCs.
This article is an original article by TechNode reporters, and may not be reprinted without authorization.
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