Today, AI runs primarily in the cloud. If HP is anything to go by, this won’t always be necessary on new PCs starting next year.

Enrique Lores, CEO of HP, makes it clear at the brand’s Imagine event: “AI will change the PC.” Somewhat predictably: Where do we not see AI today?

He clarifies his words after the somewhat expected quote. “There will be new PCs and experiences. To date, everything related to AI happens in the cloud. That will change next year when we see these features on our PCs.”

He points to three advantages of a local approach:

• Local AI is 80 percent cheaper
• The latency is significantly lower for applications
• Data protection and privacy, as the data no longer has to go to the cloud

Lores gives no indication of how HP intends to approach this in practice. We suspect that integrating Windows Copilot will allow a lot of things to happen on the device instead of going to the cloud for Windows features. In our opinion, this is theoretically possible today via the CPU or integrated GPU. Unless HP is thinking of a small, separate AI accelerator in some devices?

On the other hand, Intel is planning Meteor Lake, a chip with a completely new architecture, which will be available to PC manufacturers from December 14, 2023. The chip consists of various modules and can potentially take on AI tasks efficiently. Earlier this week, Google announced its new Pixel 8 phones with a special TPU on top of its own Google Tensor chip that can run AI models locally.

In any case, we will have to wait and see how Lores’ promises are put into practice. CES 2024, traditionally the place where new laptops are announced, promises to be a special edition.

At the same Imagine event, HP previously announced the Envy Move, an AIO PC with a handle and battery that can be used anywhere.