Microsoft is releasing a preview build of Windows that offers more personalised AI running on Nvidia, AMD and Intel GPUs
Nvidia has announced it is collaborating with Microsoft to power personalised AI applications on Windows through Copilot. The collaboration will extend to other GPU vendors, too, meaning AMD and Intel will also benefit.
The Windows Copilot Runtime will receive support for GPU acceleration, which means GPUs will be able to apply their AI smarts to apps on the OS a little easier.
«The collaboration will provide application developers with easy application programming interface (API) access to GPU-accelerated small language models (SLMs) that enable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) capabilities that run on-device powered by Windows Copilot Runtime.»
In simpler terms, it allows developers to use an API to have GPUs accelerate heavily-personalised AI jobs on Windows, such as content summaries, automation, and generative AI.
Nvidia currently offers one RAG application, Chat with RTX, which runs on its own graphics cards. In theory, further applications like this are possible with the Copilot runtime support, and Nvidia has at least one more of interest to PC gamers: Project G-Assist. It also has a new RTX AI Toolkit, «a suite of tools and SDKs for model customization.»
This is potentially a promising move for Nvidia, and other GPU vendors. Right now the fight for dominance in client AI inference (i.e. local AI processing) is currently being fought by Intel, AMD and Qualcomm in laptops. Yet GPUs are actually fantastically powerful for AI.
Developers can choose where to put their AI applications: CPU, NPU (AI-specific accelerator block), or on the GPU. Greater access, or easier access, through an API, would mean developers can make better use of these components and make more powerful applications.
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And it's not just Nvidia set to benefit. GPU acceleration through Copilot Runtime will be open to other GPUs.
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