2024 Will Be the Year of AI’s PC Ascendancy

Artificial Intelligence was the trending topic of 2023, with Collins English Dictionary awarding “AI” its ‘Word of the Year’ title. Governments, businesses, unions, and academics all over the world debated the good and bad elements of the trending technology, particularly in its generative form, while public discussion ranged from the fearful to the enthusiastic. Whichever way you look at it, AI is without doubt the biggest game-changing technology in recent times, with some of the many benefits including easing workplace demands and life’s challenges, heralding healthcare breakthroughs, improving smart living systems, and increasing the democratisation of education.

With 2023 being the year of generative AI development, 2024 will be the year AI moves from the debating and development platforms into lives everywhere. Intel is so convinced of its spread that it has unleashed a portfolio of AI products to enable customers’ AI solutions everywhere across the data centre, cloud, network, edge, and PC.

Intel launched the Intel Core Ultra mobile processor family, the first to benefit from Intel’s largest architectural shift in 40 years, which delivers the brand’s most power-efficient client processor and ushers in the age of the AI PC. The 5th Gen Intel Xeon processor family is built with AI acceleration in every core, turbo-charging overall performance and lowering total cost of ownership. The company signalled more advances with the planned 2024 launch of the Intel Gaudi3 AI accelerator.

During an ‘AI Everything’ event held in the US and live-streamed across the globe, Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger sounded a positively bullish outlook of the benefits of AI innovation, which he says is poised to raise the digital economy’s impact up to as much as one-third of global gross domestic product.

With 2024 set to be the year of ‘AI Everywhere’ and Intel moving to ensure that becomes the reality of the next 12 months, the company is partnering with more than 100 software vendors to bring several hundred AI-boosted applications to the PC market. We can, says Gelsinger, look forward to a wide array of highly creative, productive, and fun applications that will massively change the PC experience with Intel Core Ultra bringing AI to more than 230 designs from laptop and PC makers worldwide with an arsenal of new tools reshaping the way we work, learn, and create.

Intel’s new AI line-up will be everywhere, even in the places we might least expect. Imagine a restaurant that guides our menu choices based on our budget and dietary needs; a factory floor that catches quality and safety issues at source; an ultrasound that sees what human eyes might miss; or even a power grid that manages electricity with careful precision, helping to mitigate energy crises.

Of course, AI is already operating in many everyday scenarios. Zoom, for instance, runs AI workloads on Intel Core-based client systems and Intel Xeon-based cloud solutions to deliver the best user experience and costs. Zoom uses AI to suppress the intrusive external sounds and to generate meeting summaries and emails. Then, of course, we have seen strong take up of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is now in the mainstream and other competitors coming to the market, with Microsoft planning to launch its Copilot generative AI assistant in spring 2024.

Soon we will all be using AI or exposed to it in one form or another. Of course, the debate on its benefits or otherwise will continue, as well as the governance and ethical frameworks needed to guide its further development and use. But make no mistake, AI will be on the ascendance in 2024 – and with partners and a broad ecosystem, Intel will be using it to unlock new growth opportunities, taking the on-trend tech everywhere in the new year.