Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Introducing Copilot+ PCs

blogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

571–580 of 614 posts

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#571

Post by Joe_Cool »

yread wrote: post #388
bambax wrote: post #272

> We set out to solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily – finding something we know we have seen before on our PC. Today, we must remember what file folder it was stored in, what website it was on, or scroll through hundreds of emails trying to find it. It is indeed frustrating that one still cannot search effectively a local device, but it doesn't need AI to solve. It needs a proper search engi…

What there are still people who don't install Voidtools' Everything on all Windows PCs and assign it a global shortcut? Since I have it I don't even bother organizing stuff

It's amazing. It does what Google Desktop tried and failed to do on Windows XP. And it's blazingly fast by reading NTFS directly instead of using the Windows API. (OK, back then needing 1GB of RAM was pretty much impossible.)

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#572

Post by Joe_Cool »

wkat4242 wrote: post #517
ericswpark wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had a perfectly working search box in Windows 7, then gutted it and made it search the web whenever you wanted to launch Notepad.

It worked ok for finding apps, not so much for random files or especially content within files.

If you had it index everything you want to find it would do just that. And be excruciatingly slow, unreliable and wasting Gigabytes of storage. All while consuming tons of CPU time in the background.

The idea of an indexing service is good though. KDE's Baloo faces similar issues. It's not that easy to make it a good experience.

Everything (mentioned in this thread) comes closest to being fast, reliable, and usable. It can even index external disks and search them while offline.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#573

Post by Joe_Cool »

JohnFen wrote: post #564
vbezhenar wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should implement simple search first, so I don't need to reach grep for everything. Then they should implement pdftotext and fuzzy search. Of course everything should work instantly for small folders. That would be enough for 99% people.

A million times this. Windows search is, as near as I can tell, completely worthless and I have to install other utilities to have working basic search. I don't need or want anything fancy like semantic searching. I just want to be able to grep and find things by filename.

The server version called "Windows Search Services" was rather alright. It was even integrated into the Win7 Libraries and you could search through contents server-side from Explorer.

It supported plugins and was reasonably fast. Needed a lot of RAM though and some admin to babysit it.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#574

Post by SushiHippie »

coder543 wrote: post #151
Tankenstein wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original commenter mentioned 70B, not 7B.

I had already read the comment I was responding to, and they actually mentioned both. Here's the exact quote for the 7B: "Even running a 7B will take 14GB if it's fp16." Since they called out a specific amount of memory that is entirely irrelevant to anyone actually running 7B models, I was responding to that. I'm certain that no one at Microsoft is talking about running 70B models on consumer devices. 7B models are…

They said: "Even running a 7B will take 14GB if it's fp16."

Which is correct, fp16 takes two bytes per weight, so it will be 7 billion * 2 bytes which is exactly 14GB.

They are probably aware that you could run it with 4 bit quantization (which would use 1/4 of the RAM) but explicitly mentioned fp16.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#575

Post by coder543 »

SushiHippie wrote: post #574
coder543 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had already read the comment I was responding to, and they actually mentioned both. Here's the exact quote for the 7B: "Even running a 7B will take 14GB if it's fp16." Since they called out a specific amount of memory that is entirely irrelevant to anyone actually running 7B models, I was responding to that. I'm certain that no one at Microsoft is talking about running 70B models on consumer devices. 7B models are…

They said: "Even running a 7B will take 14GB if it's fp16." Which is correct, fp16 takes two bytes per weight, so it will be 7 billion * 2 bytes which is exactly 14GB. They are probably aware that you could run it with 4 bit quantization (which would use 1/4 of the RAM) but explicitly mentioned fp16.

> > Since they called out a specific amount of memory that is entirely irrelevant to anyone actually running 7B models, I was responding to that.

> Which is correct, fp16 takes two bytes per weight, so it will be 7 billion * 2 bytes which is exactly 14GB.

As I said, it is "entirely irrelevant", which is the exact wording I used. Nowhere did I say that the calculation was wrong for fp16. Irrelevant numbers like that can be misleading to people unfamiliar with the subject matter.

No one is deploying LLMs to end users at fp16. It would be a huge waste and provide a bad experience. This discussion is about Copilot+, which is all about managed AI experiences that "just work" for the end user. Professional-grade stuff, and I believe Microsoft has good enough engineers to know better than to deploy fp16 LLMs to end users.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#576

Post by Joe_Cool »

TiredOfLife wrote: post #518
mpeg wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious, why install windows on the deck?

I mean in KDE. Using Dolphin.

I think Valve disable baloo (understandable since you don't want file indexing while gaming). That's probably why the default KDE search will perform poorly. You should be able to use KFind which will work kind of like the Windows XP search.

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#577

Post by daghamm »

akr4s1a wrote: post #288
jwells89 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, “ARM-based Linux laptop with 22h battery life” is much more interesting to me than “Windows 11 ARM-based AI PC”. If the TPU can eventually be utilized by open models under Linux that’s just a cherry on top.

Lenovo claimed 28h on their last arm laptop, real world was more like 10 for light tasks and 2 to 4 for heavier work like development

2-4 hours sounds wrong. Were you mining bitcoin in the background?

"Battery life on the ThinkPad X13s will depend on your workload ... and while you might not get close to the 28 hours that Lenovo touts in its own testing, our testing with PCMark 10 got us an amazing 15 and a half hours..."

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#578

Post by senordevnyc »

orph wrote: post #278
isoprophlex wrote: post #124

Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled. There's the AI code assistant thing that github actually started, there's the horrible chatbot maker GUI demoware, there's AI stuff you might be able to do with your sharepoint (if only you could get hold of the right ms sales rep to take your money), there's an app that does genai things on your personal MS account... And now there's a Surface rebrand? That org chart…

It made sense when I named GitHub Copilot, since that product was a passive addition to your regular workflow. The name was sticky enough that they've run with it, misunderstanding or ignoring that fundamental metaphor.

[dead]

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#579

Post by senordevnyc »

paxys wrote: post #307
bambax wrote: post #272

> We set out to solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily – finding something we know we have seen before on our PC. Today, we must remember what file folder it was stored in, what website it was on, or scroll through hundreds of emails trying to find it. It is indeed frustrating that one still cannot search effectively a local device, but it doesn't need AI to solve. It needs a proper search engi…

Anyone remember Google Desktop? Did the job perfectly 20 years ago.

[dead]

Re: Introducing Copilot+ PCs

#580

Post by walterbell »

cjk2 wrote: post #534
walterbell wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this prediction also apply to the HP, Dell and Lenovo devices with Qualcomm Oryon / Snapdragon X?

Yes. All of them. There has been a massive race to the bottom recently.

That's tragic. Was pre-2020 PC laptop hardware more reliable, from any OEM?

Apple hardware seems to be relatively unchanged, or even improved since the keyboards were fixed.

How about current Framework devices, which aspire to be repairable? Hopefully they will offer an Arm-based laptop, tablet or mini-PC.

Post reply on HN