Doesn't this lead to a lot of tension between the hardware makers and Microsoft?

MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.

Laptop manufacturers are making laptops that can run an LLM locally, but there's no point in that unless there's a local LLM to run (and Windows won't have that because Copilot). Are they going to be pre-installing Llama on new laptops?

Are we going to see a new power user / normal user split? Where power users buy laptops with LLMs installed, that can run them, and normal folks buy something that can call Copilot?

Any ideas?

It isn't just copilot that these laptops come with; manufacturers are already putting their own AI chat apps as well.

For example, the LG gram I recently got came with just such an app named Chat, though the "ai button" on the keyboard (really just right alt or control, I forget which) defaults to copilot.

If there's any tension at all, it's just who gets to be the default app for the "ai button" on the keyboard that I assume almost nobody actually uses.

> MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.

MS doesn't care where your data is, they're happy to go digging through your C drive to collect/mine whatever they want, assuming you can avoid all the dark patterns they use to push you to save everything on OneDrive anyway and they'll record all your interactions with any other AI using Recall

It's just marketing. The laptop makers will market it as if your laptop power makes a difference knowing full well that it's offloaded to the cloud.

For a slightly more charitable perspective, agentic AI means that there is still a bunch of stuff happening on the local machine, it's just not the inference itself.

Copilot is a local LLM (well SLM). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/phi-silica