AI means the PC we know is all but obsolete
● Computer and printer giant HP Inc last week unveiled the industry’s largest range of personal computers designed for artificial intelligence (AI).
At the HP Amplify Partner Conference in Las Vegas, the company — ranked No 2 in the world in PC sales — unveiled 18 new models of notebooks, desktop PCs and workstations in a new segment called the “AI PC”.
It is not the first with such computers. The No 1 PC company, Lenovo, last month lifted the lid on a series of its AI PCs, but the scope of the HP event was unprecedented in AI. Besides the formidable size of HP’s new range, it also lined up a who’s who of the top CEOs in the tech sector to endorse its strategy, and explain their roles in the new product.
Most significantly, HP CEO Enrique Lores was joined on stage by Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, which this month became the world’s third-most valuable company as it reached a $2-trillion market capitalisation. Huang is regarded as the industry’s superstar for leading his company to dominance in the supply of computer chips optimised for AI applications.
He declared that the industry was preparing to throw out all PCs, which had been rendered obsolete by AI. By implication, he suggested a coming boom in AI PC sales. “Creators, designers, data scientists, people who are in the tools creation and content creation business: your work is going to be revolutionised by the new workstations,” he said.
“You have to recognise that we’ve reinvented the computer for the first time in 30 years. Which means that 30 years’ worth of computers are obsolete. It’s not an exaggeration. I know it sounds funny and it sounds like an incredible opportunity, but the fact is, it’s true.
“Obviously the new computers, the type of software they run, the way they’re going to run it, and the type of application they’re going to create, they’re going to be completely different ... And so this is a great renaissance of the personal computer.”
Huang gave an example of a key industry about to be upended, with massive resultant spending on equipment. “There’s a trillion dollars’ worth of data centres built in the world today, and it’s been built over the course of the last 30 years. And they’re obsolete. And notice how quickly Nvidia is growing into this incredible opportunity to modernise data centres all over the world, for accelerated computing for generative AI. There’s a wave of opportunity coming at you, and the starting point is today.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who has presided over the software giant’s rise to the most valuable company — a market capitalisation of more than $3trillion — addressed the conference via videoconference. His key message was how Microsoft’s AI platform, Copilot, would be built into all the HP machines. “I think of every AI PC as a Copilot PC,” he said.
“The fundamental vision behind the PC was to be able to put the person at the centre and give them more agency. And that’s the design of Copilot, which is how you have people create faster, better.
“Bill [Gates] gave this speech at Comdex in 1993 where he talked about information at your fingertips. We’re at this new age where it’s about expertise at your fingertips. So the AI PC and these Copilot PCs are how you can get to all the expertise in the world; when you need it, you can summon it.
“Some of these new PCs with AI built in are going to be pretty transformative in bringing this age of Copilots to everybody.”
Nadella told Lores that HP and Microsoft would innovate at a rate where they would diffuse all the new technology broadly. He warned, though, that it was necessary to do so responsibly.
In this context, Business Times asked Lores after the event how HP would balance the energy-intensive demands of AI processing with a commitment it had made to sustainability. He said the new PCs ability to run AI on the machine, rather than in the cloud, made it a more sustainable model.
“We don’t have to waste energy transferring data from one site to another. It will also run faster locally. So from an energy perspective it is actually a more sustainable technology. AI in general, and some of the generative AI ways of calculation, are so much more efficient than the traditional computational models. So from a consumption perspective those are relevant from an energy perspective.”