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Amazon today launched the Amazon One app, which is designed to allow customers to scan their palms to make device-free purchases at Whole Foods, Panera Bread, and 150 third-party locations in stadiums, airports, fitness centers, and convenience stores.
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Microsoft's Copilot AI service is set to run locally on PCs, Intel told Tom's Hardware. The company also said that next-gen AI PCs would require built-in neural processing units (NPUs) with over 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of power — beyond the capabilities of any consumer processor on the market.
Intel said that the AI PCs would be able to run "more elements of Copilot" locally. Currently, Copilot runs nearly everything in the cloud, even small requests. That creates a fair amount of lag that's fine for larger jobs, but not ideal for smaller jobs. Adding local compute capability would decrease that lag, while potentially improving performance and privacy as well.
Microsoft was previously rumored to require 40 TOPS on next-gen AI PCs (along with a modest 16GB of RAM). Right now, Windows doesn't make much use of NPUs, apart from running video effects like background blurring for Surface Studio webcams. ChromeOS and macOS both use NPU power for more video and audio processing features, though, along with OCR, translation, live transcription and more, Ars Technica noted.
So far, the processor with the fastest NPU speed is Apple M3, which offers 18 TOPS across the lineup (M3, M3 Pro and M3 Ultra). AMD's Ryzen 8040 and 7040 laptop
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Oregon this week signed a Right to Repair bill into law, and it is notable because it is the first such law that puts a stop to the practice of parts pairing. Manufacturers like Apple are not able to require customers to use Apple-sourced parts that then have to be authenticated, with the bill giving Apple device owners the right to use new parts, used parts, or third-party parts.
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