There's No "A.I." in "Cui Bono"

Unless you are a creator, you probably don’t think much about copyrights. But The New York Times got my immediate attention with Cecilia Kang’s article The Sleepy Copyright Office in the Middle of a High-Stakes Clash Over A.I.. There are many fronts where A.I.’s rapid development are exposing how our legal and regulatory structures have not caught up – I need only point to the Taylor Swift deepfake porn mess – but copyright law has to be at or near the top of the list.

Right now, that's wishful thinking. Credit: Bing Image Creator

This is crucial, because, as Fred Havemeyer, an analyst at the financial research firm Macquarie told The New York Times in a different article: “Copyright will be one of the key points that shapes the generative A.I. industry.” Technology lawyer and podcaster Denise Howell told Axios: "Copyright is incredibly broad and all-encompassing. We're in the wild west days of this, as far as how it's going to shake out legally."

It’s important to note that, as of now, only humans can obtain copyrights, as affirmed by a federal court last summer and by a Copyright Office ruling earlier last year. But the Copyright Office recognizes that times are changing and has initiated a more formal review of AI and copyright.

Credit: U.S. Copyright Office

“The attention on A.I. is intense,” Shira Perlmutter, director of the U.S. Copyright Office, told Ms. Kang. “The current generative A.I. systems raise a lot of complicated copyright issues — some have called them existential — that really require us to start grappling with fundamental questions about the nature and value of human creativity.”

The Office has received thousands of public comments about that review, which is a highly unusual response. “We are now finding ourselves the subject of a lot of attention from the broader general public, so it is a very exciting and challenging time,” Ms. Perlmutter diplomatically acknowledged.  

“What the Copyright Office is doing is a big deal because there are important principles of law and lots and lots of money involved,” Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of copyright and intellectual property law at Harvard Law School, told Ms. Kang. “At the end of the day, the issue is not whether these models will exist. It’s who will get paid.”

I.e., cui bono.

"Copyright owners have been lining up to take whacks at generative AI like a giant piñata woven out of their works. 2024 is likely to be the year we find out whether there is money inside," James Grimmelmann, professor of digital and information law at Cornell, told Axios. "Every time a new technology comes out that makes copying or creation easier, there's a struggle over how to apply copyright law to it.”

And how to profit from it.

The Wall Street Journal asked its readers to weigh in on the topic, and here is a small sampling of the responses:

• “Only humans should be granted copyrights. AI should be held responsible if it violates copyright protections during any of its operations.”
• “Copyright is needed in an environment where it is difficult to generate an original, and easy to generate a copy…That is, until today, when imitating a style or combining several styles is as easy as running a copy machine. Therefore I expect copyright to be replaced by another law, which will also consider the copying of style.”
• “I think those whose material the AI was trained on should own the input. They exclusively created it. But the output—the finished product enhanced by AI—should be copyrighted by the person who deployed the AI.”
• “If the AI is not sentient, then copyright should attach to the person who worked with the AI (even if it was just a request to create or think about an item). If AI becomes sentient, then copyright should belong to the AI—since it would be a separate, self-aware intelligence.”
• “If a work is created by AI, it should be protected by copyright, but in a clearly defined category.”

Obviously, there’s not quite agreement about exactly what A.I. does – it is creating, copying, or reshuffling?’ – or who should benefit, how.

Still wishful thinking. Credit: Bing Image Creator

One of the provocateurs in this area has been Stephen Thaler and The Artificial Inventor Project, which has initiated a “series of pro bono legal test cases seeking intellectual property rights for AI-generated output in the absence of a traditional human inventor or author,” with the intent “to promote dialogue about the social, economic, and legal impact of frontier technologies such as AI and to generate stakeholder guidance on the protectability of AI-generated output.”

I previously wrote about Dr. Thaler’s efforts to obtain patents for inventions created by his A.I. system DABUS, none of which has yet been successful. He keeps trying though, with both patents and copyrights. Just last week he asked a federal appeals court to reverse the Copyright Office’s ruling that human authorship is required for a copyright. He told the court: “nothing in the Copyright Act requires human creation…What the Act's language indicates is that when an entity — a natural person, a corporation, a machine — generates a creative work, that entity is the author."

I wish him luck, but I wouldn’t bet on the court ruling in his favor just yet.  It’s all going to get sorted out eventually – by the courts, by Congress, by the market – but probably not until the proverbial horse has long left the barn.

Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, asks the provocative question Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?  His conclusion:

Whatever happens, the existential threats of A.I. will not be addressed by copyright law. What we’re looking at right now is a struggle over money. Licensing agreements, copyright protections, employment contracts—it’s all going to result in a fantastically complex regulatory regime in which the legal fiction of information “ownership” gives some parties a bigger piece of the action than other parties. Life in an A.I. world will be very good for lawyers. Unless, of course, they are replaced with machines.

I.e., it’s not about A.I. or even “creating;” it’s always about the money. Cui bono?

The key question is whether A.I. is actually creating, or is just a tool used by humans in      creating. As one WSJ reader put it: “Again, the owner of the “David” sculpture is not the guy who made the chisel and hammer.” I think we’re still in a fuzzy area, but I also firmly believe A.I. will create. It will write, it will make art, it will invent, and it will come up with novel solutions to problems.

And, one way or another, it will get paid.

Zombie Viruses of the Permafrost

We’ve had some cold weather here lately, as has much of the nation. Not necessarily record-breaking, but uncomfortable for millions of people. It’s the kind of weather that causes climate change skeptics to sneer “where’s the global warming now?” This despite 2023 being the warmest year on record -- “by far” -- and the fact that the ten warmest years since 1850 have all been in the last decade, according to NOAA.

Permafrost thawing might look pretty, but beware. Credit: Bing Image Creator

One of the parts of the globe warming the fastest is the Arctic, which is warming four times as fast as the rest of the planet. That sounds like good news if you run a shipping company looking for shorter routes (or to avoid the troubled Red Sea area), but may be bad news for everyone else.  If you don’t know why, I have two words for you: zombie viruses.

Most people are at least vaguely aware of permafrost, which covers vast portions of Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. Historically, it’s been literally frozen, not just seasonally but for years, decades, centuries, millennia, or even longer. Well, it’s starting to thaw.

Now, maybe its kind of cool that we’re finding bodies of extinct species like the woolly mammoth (which some geniuses want to revive). But also buried in the permafrost are lots of microorganisms, many of which are not, in fact, dead but are in kind of a statis. As geneticist Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University, recently explained to The Observer: “The crucial point about permafrost is that it is cold, dark and lacks oxygen, which is perfect for preserving biological material. You could put a yoghurt in permafrost and it might still be edible 50,000 years later.”

Dr. Claverie and his team first revived such a virus – some 30,000 years old -- in 2014 and last year did the same for some that were 48,000 years old. There are believed to be organisms that ae perhaps a million years old, far older than we’ve been around. Scientists prefer to call them Methuselah microbes, although “zombie viruses” is more likely to get people’s attention.

A 30,000 old zombie virus. Bartoli and Abergel/Information Génomique et Structurale, CNRS-AMU

He’s worried about the risks they pose. He told The Observer: “At the moment, analyses of pandemic threats focus on diseases that might emerge in southern regions and then spread north. By contrast, little attention has been given to an outbreak that might emerge in the far north and then travel south – and that is an oversight, I believe. There are viruses up there that have the potential to infect humans and start a new disease outbreak.”

Well, you might shrug; there’s new viruses and pathogens coming along all the time, as COVID reminded us. The difference, Dr. Claverie pointed out, is this: “Our immune systems may have never been in contact with some of those microbes, and that is another worry. The scenario of an unknown virus once infecting a Neanderthal coming back at us, although unlikely, has become a real possibility.”

Jill Brandenberger, climate security research lead at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory told USA Today. “We know there’s bacterial, fungal and viral pathogens that are in permafrost. We know that upon thaw, all three of those classes of pathogens could be released. What we don’t know is how viable it is for them to stay alive and then infect.” Tell that to the people who died in the anthrax outbreak in 2016, in northwest Siberia.

It's worse than just the permafrost warming. Dr. Claverie warns:

The danger comes from another global warming impact: the disappearance of Arctic sea ice. That is allowing increases in shipping, traffic and industrial development in Siberia. Huge mining operations are being planned, and are going to drive vast holes into the deep permafrost to extract oil and ores.

Those operations will release vast amounts of pathogens that still thrive there. Miners will walk in and breath the viruses. The effects could be calamitous.

Marion Koopmans, of the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, agrees, telling The Observer:

If you look at the history of epidemic outbreaks, one of the key drivers has been change in land use. Nipah virus was spread by fruit bats who were driven from their habitats by humans. Similarly, monkeypox has been linked to the spread of urbanisation in Africa. And that is what we are about to witness in the Arctic: a complete change in land use, and that could be dangerous, as we have seen elsewhere.

And, if you’ve started to get your head around all that, if the permafrost thawing isn’t scaring us enough with the zombie viruses, there’s also a vicious global warming cycle involved. It turns out that permafrost is believed to have double the amount of carbon than is currently in the atmosphere, and which thawing permafrost releases in the form of methane and carbon dioxide.

"Methane is a potent greenhouse gas," said Dr. Thomas Birchall of the University Center in Svalbard, who was the lead author on a new study. "At present, the leakage from below permafrost is very low, but factors such as glacial retreat and permafrost thawing may 'lift the lid' on this in the future."  And, as it turns out, another new report concluded, such leakage is not being factored into most of our existing climate models.

"What happens to the carbon in permafrost is one of the biggest unknowns about our future climate," said Christina Schaedel, senior research scientist at Woodwell Climate Research Center and lead author of the report. "Earth system models are critical to predicting where, how and when this carbon will be released, but modeling teams currently don't have the resources they need to depict permafrost accurately. If we want more accurate climate predictions, that needs to change."

We don’t even have good ways to accurately estimate the thawing of the permafrost, although we’re starting to use satellite data and – you guessed it! -- AI to help improve those estimates.

So if your five-year-old is worried that global warming will impact Santa’s North Pole home, you can still reassure him/her about that, but there’s not much reassurance we can give kids about what permafrost thawing means for zombie viruses and accelerated global warming.

It's Clear to Me

I didn’t make it to this year’s CES, the “most powerful tech event in the world,” as its organizers like to brag, where the latest and greatest in technology gets shown off. Then again, I’ve never been to any CES, so, as usual, I’ve had to settle for reading various recaps. There was, as always, lots of cool stuff, but the thing I keep coming back to were the transparent screens.

LG's transparent TV. Credit: LG

I’ve long complained that screens are an outdated concept, a 20^th century technology that we should be ready to move beyond. I’m ready for holograms, eyeball displays, or other non-screen approaches. Transparent screens don’t quite get us there but they get us closer, helping us forget that there is a screen involved in whatever display we see.

Let’s start with LG, which unveiled “the world's first wireless transparent OLED TV.” LG brags it “is a true technological marvel, combining a transparent 4K OLED screen and LG's wireless video and audio transmission technology to transform the screen experience in ways that have never been possible before…giving users the unprecedented freedom to meticulously curate their living spaces.”

LG promises:

Its transparent OLED screen removes the usual constraints that come with conventional TVs. No longer does the TV have to be placed against the wall. Instead, place the OLED T in the middle of the room to become a divider or prop it against the window without blocking the view outside.

LG's transparent OLED lets owners discover new forms of entertainment and use via its dual viewing experiences: transparent and opaque. The OLED T becomes a transparent digital canvas for showcasing artwork, videos or photos with the Always-On-Display (AOD) feature. Content displayed on the transparent screen appears to float in air, yet simultaneously fuses with the surrounding space to create a compelling and atmospheric visual effect.

Chris Welsh, writing in The Verge, marveled: “I’ve looked through LG’s new transparent OLED TV and seen something special.” He wasn’t as impressed by how great a TV experience it ended up being, noting: “You’re making objective sacrifices for the transparency trick, so it’s worth considering how quickly the novelty of this TV might wear off.” But he did admit: “there were times when the TV’s transparency mode gave off a sense of depth that really messed with my brain.”

Similarly, CNET’s David Katzmaier said it was “one of the coolest TVs I’ve ever seen.” When first entering the demo suite, he at first didn’t realize it was a screen. He concluded: “A TV that can effectively disappear and transform into furniture, art or a fish tank, the OLED TV succeeds brilliantly…To add to the cool factor, the OLED T uses the company's wireless transmission technology.” The only cord or wire is the power cord.

Both reviewers admitted it wasn’t the best TV display, and certainly is pricey, but both appear quite impressed.

Meanwhile, Samsung unveiled its MICRO LED, “showing the world that there are infinite possibilities for screens.” The company claims: “The screen, which looks like a piece of transparent glass, boasts an extremely small MICRO LED chip and precision manufacturing process that eliminates seams and light refraction. This allows the transparent MICRO LED to create a clear, unobstructed picture for various use cases in both homes and B2B environments.”

Engadget’s Sam Rutherford wrote: “In person, the effect Samsung's transparent micro OLED displays have is hard to describe, as content almost looks like a hologram as it floats in mid-air. The demo unit was freestanding and measured only about a centimeter thick, which adds even more to the illusion of a floating screen.” He further noted that images looked “incredibly sharp.”  

Becky Scarrott of Techradar described the MICRO LED “as transparent as regular glass, and also boasts a design devoid of any physical frame,” marveling that the result was “like a hologram.” Mr. Katzmaier acknowledged: “I've reviewed hundreds of TVs, and in my short time with Samsung's concept displays, the Micro-LED version did indeed look the best, especially in terms of brightness and color.”

Honestly, I don’t really care much about improving people’s TV experience. Most people seem to upgrade their TVs a lot more regularly than I do, and spend a lot more money. I’m not that discerning and I don’t need huge screens. What I am intrigued by, though, is making screens less obtrusive, whether they are TV screens, computer screens, or smartphone screens. I want images to seemingly appear out of nowhere, like magic.

If we can’t have holograms (yet), transparent screens might not be a bad interim solution.

Imagine, for example, a physician using a two-sided transparent screen for the EHR. Instead of the screen being a distraction that gets in the way of focusing on the patient, the doctor could use it facing the patient, with the patient seeing the same text/images the physician sees, appearing to simply float in the air.

Another example of the power of transparency is a result from the University of California San Diego. Researchers there developed a neural implant that can provide information about brain activity deep inside the brain even though sitting on the surface.

I won’t try to go into the woods about what it does, but the researchers note:

Transparency is one of the key features of this neural implant. Traditional implants use opaque metal materials for their electrodes and wires, which block the view of neurons beneath the electrodes during imaging experiments. In contrast, an implant made using graphene is transparent, which provides a completely clear field of view for a microscope during imaging experiments.

"We are expanding the spatial reach of neural recordings with this technology," said study senior author Duygu Kuzum, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note the advances in transparent wood – yes, you read that right. Jude Coleman of Knowable Magazine wrote: “Transparent wood could soon find uses in super-strong screens for smartphones; in soft, glowing light fixtures, and even as structural features, such as color-changing windows.

Or maybe in your next transparent TV.

One way or another, I’m excited to see where the technology around transparency is going to take us.

Au Contraire

This morning HHS announced the appointment of its first Chief Competition Officer. I probably would have normally skipped it, except that just last week, writing in The Health Care Blog, Kat McDavitt and Lisa Bari called for HHS to name a Chief Patient Officer. I’ll touch on each of those shortly, but it made me think about all the Chiefs healthcare is getting, such as Chief Innovation Officer or Chief Customer Experience Officer.  

But what healthcare may need even more than those is a Chief Contrarian.  

Your team needs a contrarian. Credit: Bing Image Creator

The new HHS role “is responsible for coordinating, identifying, and elevating opportunities across the Department to promote competition in health care markets,” and “will play a leading role in working with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice to address concentration in health care markets through data-sharing, reciprocal training programs, and the further development of additional health care competition policy initiatives.” All good stuff, to be sure.

Similarly., Ms. McDevitt and Ms, Bari point out that large healthcare organizations have the staff, time, and financial resources to ensure their points of view are heard by HHS and the rest of the federal government, whereas: “Patients do not have the resources to hire lobbyists or high-profile legal teams, nor do they have a large and well-funded trade association to represent their interests.” They go on to lament: “Because of this lack of access, resources, and representation, and because there is no single senior staff member in the federal government dedicated to ensuring the voice of the patient is represented, the needs and experiences of patients are deprioritized by corporate interests.” Thus the need for a Chief Patient Officer. Again, bravo.

The need for a Chief Contrarian – and not just at HHS – came to me from an article in The Conversation by Dana Brakman Reiser, a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. She and colleague Claire Hill, a University of Minnesota law professor, argue that non-profit boards need to have “designated contrarians.”

They propose:

We believe nonprofit boards should require their members to take turns serving as “designated contrarians.” When it’s their turn for this role, board members would be responsible for asking critical questions and pushing for deeper debate about organizational decisions.

Their idea draws upon research from Lindred (Lindy) Greer, a professor of organizational behavior then at Stanford GSB and now at Michigan Ross. Her research suggested that teams need a “skilled contrarian” to improve its effectiveness. “It’s important for teams to have a devil’s advocate who is constructive and careful in communication, who carefully and artfully facilitates discussion,” Professor Greer concluded.

Who is your designated contrarian? Credit: Bing Image Creator

Her research, conducted with Ruchi Sinha, Niranjan Janardhanan, Donald Conlon, and Jeff Edwards, found that teams with a lone dissenter outperformed teams with no dissenters, or teams where everyone dissents. The key, they believe, was not to create conflict but to help identify differences and resolve resulting conflicts in non-confrontational ways.

Professors Reiser and Hill worry that “board members often fail to ask hard questions and challenge the organization’s paid staff – especially when there are more than a dozen or so people serving as directors.” They might assume everyone shares their “good intentions,” or they might just be uncomfortable “rocking the boat.”

I would argue that the same is true throughout most organizations, whether in the C-Suite or in the rest of workforce. Who is asking the hard questions?

Professors Reiser and Hill believe they have a solution:

We propose that trustees take turns being a designated contrarian, temporarily becoming a devil’s advocate obliged to challenge proposed board actions.

To be clear, they wouldn’t be naysayers out to block everything. They would instead ask probing questions and offer feedback on reports by executives and officers. They would also initiate critical discussions by challenging conventional wisdom.

The goal, they say, “would be to encourage debate and reflection about the nonprofit’s decisions, slowing – or halting, if necessary – the approval of business as usual.” Again, there’s nothing unique about non-profits or even about boards here.

If you have a team, a management staff, a C-Suite, a board (non-profit or not), or a federal agency, you need a contrarian. Someone who is not afraid to point out when, as they say, the emperor has no clothes. Who is not afraid to ask those hard questions, to rock that boat. Who realizes the status quo is not only not good enough but also never is going to last.

Organizations whose boats don’t get rocked enough are likely to capsize sooner or later.

Picking the right person(s) is crucial. Someone who is too abrasive will just create more conflict and will eventually get frozen out. On the other hand, as Professor Reiser points out: “Serving a term as contrarian will not magically transform a passive and deferential person into someone who actively challenges dominant voices or forcefully advocates alternatives. And directors wearing the contrarian hat may be too easily discounted if others perceive them as merely mouthing their assigned lines.”

It's not a role that anyone can fill, or that everyone should, but a role that is important which someone does.

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It has been said that organizations that need innovation units or a Chief Innovation Officer aren’t truly innovative; it needs to be baked into the culture. Similarly, needing a Chief Customer Experience Officer means customer experience is not integral to the mission. If HHS needs a Chief Competition Officer or a Chief Patient Officer, it is validation that HHS has been coopted by the special interests that healthcare is full of, and those interests aren’t primarily about patients. We need to reflect upon that; simply naming those Officers won’t be enough.

By the same token, if your organization needs a Chief Contrarian or designated contrarians, that means it doesn’t encourage healthy dissent or seek ideas that don’t reflect existing paradigms. That’s a problem.

I am, I have to admit, something of a contrarian by nature. I never had an official role as such, but I never shied away from speaking up (even when it wasn’t in my best career interests).  But, boy, if I’d had the chance to be a Chief Contrarian or a designated contrarian, I’d have loved it!

AI Inside

Well: 2024. I’m excited about the Paris Olympics, but otherwise I’d be just as happy to sleep through all the nonsense that the November elections will bring. In any event, I might as well start out talking about one of the hottest topics of 2023 that will get even moreso in 2024: AI.  

In particular, I want to look at what is being billed as the “AI PC.” 

Get used to AI in your devices. Credit: Bing Image Creator

Most of us have come to know about ChatGPT. Google has Bard (plus DeepMind’s Gemini), Microsoft is building AI into Bing and its other products, Meta released an open source AI, and Apple is building its AI framework. There is a plethora of others. You probably have used “AI assistants” like Alexa or Siri.

What most of the large language model (LLM) versions of AI have in common is that they are cloud-based. What AI PCs offer to do is to take AI down to your own hardware, not dissimilar to how PCs took mainframe computing down to your desktop.  

As The Wall Street Journal tech gurus write in their 2024 predictions in their 2024 predictions:

In 2024, every major manufacturer is aiming to give you access to AI on your devices, quickly and easily, even when they’re not connected to the internet, which current technology requires. Welcome to the age of the AI PC. (And, yes, the AI Mac.)

What’s coming is what engineers call “on-device AI.” Like our smartphones, our laptops will gain the ability to do the specialized computing required to perform AI-boosted tasks without connecting to the cloud. They will be able to understand our speech, search and summarize information, even generate images and text, all without the slow and costly round trip to a tech company’s server.

The chip companies are ready. Intel just announced their new AI PC chip. It believes that its new Intel® Core™ Ultra processor will change PCs forever: “Now, AI is for everyone.” If you’re used to thinking about CPU and GPU, now you’ll have to think about “NPU” – neural processing units.

Intel promises: “With AI-acceleration built into every Intel® Core™ Ultra processor, you now have access to a variety of experiences – enhanced collaboration, productivity, and creativity – right at your desktop.” It further claims it is working with over 100 developers, and expects those developers to offer over 300 “AI-accelerated features” in 2024.

Rival AMD has also released its own AI chips. “We continue to deliver high performance and power-efficient NPUs with Ryzen AI technology to reimagine the PC,” said Jack Huynh, SVP and GM of AMD computing and graphics business. “The increased AI capabilities of the 8040 series will now handle larger models to enable the next phase of AI user experiences.”

And, of course, AI chip powerhouse Nvidia isn’t sitting idly in the AI PC race.  It says that already: “For GeForce RTX users, AI is now running on your PC. It’s personal, enhancing every keystroke, every frame and every moment.”

Nvidia sees four advantages to AI PCs:

• Availability: Whether a gamer or a researcher, everyone needs tools — from games to sophisticated AI models used by wildlife researchers in the field — that can function even when offline.
• Speed: Some applications need instantaneous results. Cloud latency doesn’t always cut it.
• Data size: Uploading and downloading large datasets from the cloud can be inefficient and cumbersome.
• Privacy: Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or just editing family photos and videos, we all have data we want to keep close to home.

The PC manufacturers are getting ready. DigitalTrends’ Fionna Agomuoh spoke to multiple Lenovo executives, who are all-in on AI PCs. “Put simply,” she writes. “Lenovo sees the “AI PC” as a PC where AI is integrated at every level of the system, including both software and hardware.”  Lenovo Executive Vice President of Intelligent Devices Group, Luca Rossi, cited an example with gaming: “We apply certain AI techniques to improve the gaming experience. By making the machine understand what kind of usage model you’re going to do and then a machine fine tunes, the speed, the temperature, etc.”

AMD’s Jason Banta believes “the AI PC will be the next technological revolution since the graphical interface,” which is a pretty startling statement. He elaborated:

Prior to this, you kind of just typed commands. It wasn’t quite as intuitive. You saw the graphical interface with the mouse, and it really changed the way you interacted the productivity. How you got things done, how it felt. I think AI PC is going to be that powerful if not more powerful.

Mr. Banta also believes that having AI built into the PC will make AI cheaper, more secure, and more private.

HP’s CEO Enrique Lores told CNBC in November that AI capabilities will spur PC sales: “we think this is going to double the growth of the PC category starting next year.” Technology research form Canalys predicts 60% of PCs shipped in 2027 will be AI-capable. IDC analysts are similarly bullish, saying: “The integration of AI capabilities into PCs is expected to serve as a catalyst for upgrades, hitting shelves in 2024.”

Windows Central reports that Microsoft plans to release Surface Pro 10 as its first AI PC. Surface Laptop 6 may also feature AI capabilities, although what exactly those capabilities are for either device remain unclear.

And, yes, when we say “AI PC,” we’ll also be seeing AI Mac. “Apple may not wax eloquent about AI but it knows very well that the use cases for this technology are booming and that the development work will require unprecedented computing power,” Dipanjan Chatterjee, an analyst at Forrester, told CNN. “That’s a huge emerging opportunity, and Apple wants a piece of that pie.”

The people who aren’t quite ready are us.

Moral of the story: in the not-too-distant future, saying “AI PC” will be redundant. AI capabilities will be built-in, assumed – and not just in your PC but also your phone, your watch, your car, all of your devices. Some of those capabilities will be local, some may be boosted by nearby networked devices, others will rely on the cloud.

I’ll be interested in how any learning that a local AI gains is passed along to other versions, and vice-versa. E.g., my health devices will know things about how my health is impacted by various treatments, and some of those should be pooled with other patient data for broader meaning.

Just like 2023, AI is going to continue to surprise and impress us in 2024.