News Windows 11 Copilot+ AI features like Recall can be enabled without an NPU

[Admin]

Windows 11's AI features may not actually need AI hardware, after all — at least, Recall certainly doesn't.

Windows 11 Copilot+ AI features like Recall can be enabled without an NPU : Read more

 

[ezst036]

This is entirely unsurprising.

Microsoft wants to move further into the ad-delivery space more strongly, and co-pilot can increase the value of ads - and what I really mean is that Microsoft can charge advertisers even more with "intelligent" promotion spots. (links below)

So why should ads be limited to if you have an NPU? That would not be a wise limitation when advertising revenue is at stake.

https://www.techspot.com/news/100386-microsoft-copilot-can-show-third-party-advertising-windows.html

https://www.windowscentral.com/soft...ai-and-its-annoying-ad-campaign-in-windows-11

https://www.seroundtable.com/microsoft-advertising-adds-copilot-37037.html

Microsoft is testing more Copilot ads in Edge

You may soon encounter more Copilot ads across the Microsoft Edge browser. The latest Canary update introduced a new banner promoting Copilot's ability to work with different Edge features.

www.neowin.net

Microsoft slips ads into Bing Chat AI-powered Windows 11 Copilot

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft has also slipped ads into Windows Copilot on Windows 11. The adverts are visible for specific search queries, such as prompts like “compare Amazon Prime with Netflix.” In search queries described above, you might see adverts for Amazon Prime within Windows 11’s Copilot...

www.windowslatest.com

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Aside from privacy issues and such, something I haven't seen talked about much is how much space Recall will end up consuming. To quote Ars Technica

• The default allocation for Recall on a 256GB device is 25GB, which can store approximately three months of snapshots. Users can adjust the allocation in their PC settings, with old snapshots being deleted once the allocated storage is full.

25GB of space for something probably 99.999% of people won't use or adjust is quite significant, especially since this is on top of the 15-20GB of space System Restore can use, plus the rather large hibernation file, and page file, and everything else that Windows can use. If you're using a 256GB drive you're going to easily see nearly half of it unavailable, and after you tack on your preferred office, chat, and other "necessary" programs your next step is going to be "buy a larger drive". To quote a table from Microsoft's page on Recall:

Device storage capacity	Storage allocation options for Recall
256 GB	25 GB (default), 10 GB
512 GB	75 GB (default), 50 GB, 25 GB
1 TB, or more	150 GB (default), 100 GB, 75 GB, 50 GB, 25 GB

If you have a 1TB SSD then by default 15% of your space is immediately reserved for Recall, which is -insane-. Yes you can limit it down, but how many people are going to do this? Probably about the number of people who flush their system restore points and limit its reserved space.

And think about it, if it's only useful for 3 months, then what use is it really? Not worth 25GB+ of space on my disk that's for sure.

 

[TerryLaze]

Yeah, you can also run windows 10 on a pentium II or do video transcoding without a GPU you can do anything without specialized hardware as long as you have enough time and don't care about how much power it will use.

If you have a 1TB SSD then by default 15% of your space is immediately reserved for Recall, which is -insane-.

That's not how windows works, just like the pagefile this will just be an upper limit and not committed from the beginning, it will just start deleting older stuff when reaching this limit but it will not start off being that size, if you don't use it ever it will be zero, or a few Mb if windows uses it for something.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Yeah, you can also run windows 10 on a pentium II or do video transcoding without a GPU you can do anything without specialized hardware as long as you have enough time and don't care about how much power it will use.

That's not how windows works, just like the pagefile this will just be an upper limit and not committed from the beginning, it will just start deleting older stuff when reaching this limit but it will not start off being that size, if you don't use it ever it will be zero, or a few Mb if windows uses it for something.

I haven't seen anything about dynamic allocation based on disk usage, only that Windows will use 25, 75, or 150GB of space (by default, less if you select it) which says to me it's going to be marked as "reserved", so even if it's not in use by Recall nothing else can touch it, much like if you set your page file size manually to its minimum and maximum sizes, or like Windows does already by reserving 7GB of disk space for updates to ensure they don't fail due to lack of space.