The tech giant Microsoft is increasing its investment in artificial intelligence and cloud computing, with the aim of seizing the high ground for future technological development, and the Windows operating system will play an important role in this.

At the Microsoft Developer Build Conference held this week, Pavan Davuluri, the new Microsoft Windows director, told the media that Microsoft will further promote the integration of AI and the Windows ecosystem and open a new chapter in the AIPC era:

I believe that by incorporating AI throughout the operating system, we can provide more value to Windows customers, which is our global vision.

As shown at the BUILD conference, the amazing Recall feature allows users to easily search and retrieve anything on a PC, whether it's a file, image, video, or other digital record. This function will greatly improve the efficiency of users in retrieving personal data.

In addition, Microsoft also plans to make AI deeply involved in the application development process. The “Windows Copilot Runtime” toolkit launched by the company will help developers use more than 40 AI models built into Microsoft to create new application experiences.

For example, developers can use the natural language processing model in Copilot Runtime to make applications capable of natural voice interaction. Based on the computer vision model, the application can also perform intelligent vision processing such as image recognition and object detection. Microsoft hopes to stimulate the birth of more innovative applications by lowering the development threshold for AI technology.

Davuluri told the media:

I think it will open up new possibilities because you'll be doing things in the app that you couldn't do before, and I think this is an important step in improving the Windows ecosystem.

However, Windows Copilot Runtime is still in its infancy. It was designed specifically for the new AIPC, and Microsoft expects to sell 50 million such computers within the next year. It accounts for only 20% of IDC's estimated shipment volume of 247 million computers in 2023.

In addition to AI, Davuluri also believes it will be important to run Windows via the cloud rather than locally in the future. Microsoft has been moving towards this goal with its Windows 365 service.

At the Build conference, Microsoft showed the experience of running a Windows system through a cloud service on the Meta Quest headset. The new Windows volume application can transfer 3D applications similar to Hololens to VR headsets. Currently, this experience is designed for designers and people who use CAD drawing, but Davuluri believes that once the operating system is cloud-native, it will completely change and disrupt the operating system we are familiar with, just like AI.

The combination of Windows and the cloud will have a major impact on our future, and it will also change many computing paradigms because I believe that once the operating system is cloud-native, we will have almost unlimited computing scale in the cloud. I think it would make us think about operating systems in a different way.