Chip giant Intel and software titan are each working to bring artificial intelligence to the personal computer. Intel is betting that integrating dedicated AI hardware into its CPUs will give it an edge and boost demand for PCs, while Microsoft is unleashing AI-powered assistants to supercharge its Windows operating system.

The two strategies don't quite converge. Intel's latest Meteor Lake laptop CPUs include powerful AI hardware capable of enabling AI features in third-party software, but there's not nearly enough horsepower to drive something like OpenAI's GPT-4, the advanced large language model that Microsoft uses for its Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft's AI assistants thus call out to a cloud service for processing.

Two downsides of using a cloud service are latency and cost. It takes time for a cloud-based AI model to respond, especially if it's overloaded with requests. This latency impacts the user experience. It's also expensive. While Microsoft offers a basic version of Copilot for free, Copilot Pro is priced at $20 per user per month for those already subscribed to its cloud-based Microsoft 365.

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Source Fool.com