On April 18, Lenovo's annual Tech World event was held in Shanghai.
This is the 10th year that Lenovo has hosted a similar event. At last year's Tech World, Lenovo first introduced the concept of AI PCs, and this year, the highlight of the conference was the launch of a series of AI PC products that can be purchased by Chinese users.
Built-in Lenovo Xiaotian personal agent, the new series of computers is named "AI Yuanqi" series. Among the new series of computers, the highest-end is the YOGA Book 9i series, which is a full-size dual-OLED screen laptop priced at 17999 yuan, while the lowest-end Lenovo Xiaoxin Pro 16 only costs 5999 yuan. It will go on sale on May 20.
Lenovo said that the AI PC released this time meets the five major characteristics and is "a real AI PC." ”
As the first of the five features, the AI PC released this time is marked by the AI Agent agent agent - Lenovo Xiaotian.
Lenovo Xiaotian can use local models and computing power to reason to answer questions, or it can use cloud models and computing power to answer questions. When using local computing power, users can vectorize their own local documents and turn them into a personal knowledge base, allowing Xiaotian to answer questions based on personal documents without involving the problem of document leakage.
End-to-end AI is the focus of consumer electronics in the near future. On-device AI has the advantages of personalization, low power consumption, and privacy, but due to the limitations of computing power and model size, the capabilities are more limited than those of large cloud models. The device-side model on the PC is developing faster than the device-side model on the mobile phone, and Lenovo is also one of the manufacturers with the fastest progress in AI PC. So what is the ability of Lenovo's AI PC this time?
Geek Park participated in the launch event and also tested the agent effect of Lenovo's local AI on site.
The "Xiaotian" agent was measured
Geek Park tested the ability of Lenovo's AI PC's Xiaotian assistant to answer questions on the spot.
At present, Lenovo's Xiaotian assistant can be found directly in the lower right corner of the computer. Once you are on the interface, you can choose to answer questions using a local model or a cloud-based model.
In the field test, the local model can basically answer questions correctly, but the content is shorter than that of the cloud, which is suitable for use in situations with poor network environments.
When answering knowledge about the model's built-in knowledge base, the time is about the same as the latency of the network model.
As one of the important functions of AI PC, Xiaotian can directly make sensitive files into a local database, so that it can easily summarize document information and use natural language to find and answer the information in local documents. The reporter also tested it on the spot, and the answer was correct, but when it comes to local documents, the loading time is longer.
For users who care about privacy, the ability to find the internal information of local files is still very useful.
In addition, as an AI built into the terminal, Xiaotian can perform language commands such as configuration lookup and simple device tasks.
Lenovo's Xiaotian assistant can also generate pictures and help make PPT, but these functions need the cloud to be realized. In this regard, Xiaotian also has a very ingenious design. With the YOGA Book 9i's dual screens, users can draw on one screen and generate relevant pictures on the other screen.
At Lenovo's press conference, Lenovo asked a child to draw an abstract sketch of penguin skiing, but with the text prompt of "penguin skiing", the model finally generated a relatively reasonable picture, which won the applause of the scene.
AI PCs are moving fast
With the gradual improvement of computing power, AI PC is making rapid progress.
In an interview after the press conference, Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo Group, said that the current AI PC products use a hybrid computing power of NPU, CPU, and GPU. People usually use TOPS as a unit of computing power, and 1 TOPS represents one trillion (10^12) operations per second that the processor can perform. In this product, the comprehensive AI computing power can reach 200 TOPS, of which the NPU computing power can reach 10 TOPS.
However, the AI PC field as a whole is moving forward very quickly. In the direction of NPU, which is optimized for AI computing power, the chip manufacturers contacted by Lenovo in the second half of the year will launch 40-50TOPS NPU products one after another, which is equivalent to four to five times the computing power in this area.
The improvement of computing power will naturally lead to greater improvements in future AI PC products. Yang Yuanqing mentioned that at present, due to the limitation of computing power, AI PCs will still be launched in the higher-end version first. With the development of computing power, it has gradually expanded to the whole product line. It is not ruled out that some consumer-facing services will be launched in the future, so that consumers who purchased the previous equipment can upgrade to AI PCs.
From Lenovo's launch of the concept of AI PC last year to the launch of usable AI PC products this year, Lenovo itself has also made frequent moves on AI PCs.
Lenovo itself does not make large models, the core competitiveness lies in the optimization of large models in the terminal, "large models with the same parameters, whose platform can run well, whose open applications are the most technical and capable." Yang Yuanqing said.
Lenovo currently uses the 7B model on the device side. "Our ability to optimize models exceeds that of many chip manufacturers themselves. Yang Yuanqing said.
In June, Lenovo will also release AI mobile phones and AI tablets, which will also embed large models and agent assistants. Combined with AI PCs, cross-terminal AI experiences can be realized.
It is worth noting that Lenovo's AI PC this time, the first product release was placed in China. Lenovo China explained: "In fact, a lot of Lenovo's business is promoted after success in China. At the same time, he also announced a figure, next, Lenovo China will upgrade 50% of PC products to AI PC, and 890% of the whole year.
However, at present, it seems that the AI PC released this time, in addition to finding document information, etc., the application is still relatively thin, and the focus of the press conference is still the scene of using AI to do PPT.
At present, it seems that the main advantage of AI PCs is that PCs are originally used in office scenarios, and device-side AI can call local privacy files for operation. On computers, in addition to extreme scenarios such as poor network speed, it is relatively convenient for people to use cloud AI, and how to expand more advantageous scenarios for AI PCs seems to be a problem that manufacturers should think about further.