In the era of mobile office, laptops play an especially important role as productivity tools. Over the past few decades, laptops have continuously evolved and diversified into various categories such as ultrabooks, business laptops, and gaming laptops to meet the needs of different users.

A few years ago, mobile phone manufacturers led by Huawei began to make significant inroads into the PC market, driving an intelligent transformation of the traditional PC industry. To date, a flourishing scene with brands like Huawei, Lenovo, and Honor has emerged.

As Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger stated: "AI PCs are the 'Cambrian explosion' moment for personal computers," implying that AI PCs are about to experience a "life explosion" akin to the Cambrian period.

Today, the Lenovo Innovation Technology Conference opened. At the conference, Lenovo Group Chairman and CEO Yang Yuanqing officially unveiled the AI PC by launching the Yoga Book 9i.

Long hailed by Lenovo as the "true AI PC," it has finally been officially unveiled.

01

Listen to Lenovo's AI PC Answer

Let's take a look at the Yoga Book 9i. Yang Yuanqing refers to this AI PC as an "AI new species." This PC possesses the five major characteristics defined by AI PCs: built-in personal large models and intelligent entities for natural interaction with users, local heterogeneous computing power, personal knowledge bases, open artificial intelligence application ecosystems, and personal data and privacy security protection.

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He excitedly said: "With these five major features, the PC will no longer be a Personal Computer, but an AI Personalized Computer, a computer that is personalized by artificial intelligence."Lenovo's Morningstar Bipedal Robot Hands Over AI PC to Yang Yuanqing

In terms of personal large models and personal intelligence, Lenovo Xiaotian is equipped. Xiaotian has a built-in personal large model that can interact naturally with users. It can truly understand natural language and intentions, rather than just mechanically executing code commands.

In addition to the Yoga Book 9i, Lenovo also released six new AI PC products: Yoga Book AI Genesis Edition, Yoga Pro 16s AI Genesis Edition, ThinkPad T14p AI Genesis Edition, ThinkBook 16p AI Genesis Edition, Yoga Air 14 AI Genesis Edition, and Xiaoxin Pro 16 AI Genesis Edition.

In terms of pricing, the ThinkPad T14p is priced at 14,999 yuan, the ThinkBook 16p at 10,999 yuan, the Yoga Book 9i at 17,999 yuan, the Yoga Pro 16s at 13,999 yuan, and the Lenovo Xiaoxin Pro 16 at 5,999 yuan.

02

One Vision, Two Judgments, Three Pillars

Regarding the core proposition of the AI era, Lenovo provided an in-depth explanation at the conference, including: one vision, two judgments, and three pillars.

What is Lenovo's vision for artificial intelligence?

That is, to make artificial intelligence truly land in the cloud and enter thousands of households and industries, becoming more private and personalized, transforming from public intelligence to personal intelligence.On the one hand, artificial intelligence is becoming more private and personalized. It evolves from public intelligence to personal intelligence, and from a tool of technology to a companion-like personal assistant.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence is becoming more scaled and industrialized. As AI serves commercial entities and achieves scaling and industrialization, there is a need to transition from high-energy-consuming, less secure, cloud-based large models to energy-efficient, data-secure built-in organizational decision-making assistants. Additionally, workloads should be more evenly distributed across public and private clouds, edges, and endpoints, thereby truly promoting the application and transformation of intelligence.

Regarding artificial intelligence, Lenovo has two judgments.

The first judgment is that AI actually enhances, rather than replaces, human intelligence. The term "Artificial Intelligence" might be more appropriately called "Augmented Intelligence," as AI is essentially a technological means that facilitates the easier transformation of human imagination into reality.

The second judgment is that hybrid artificial intelligence is the inevitable trend in the development of AI and the inevitable path for thousands of households and industries to connect with AI. Public large models are the catalysts and accelerators for the popularization of AI, but their further widespread application is limited by factors such as network speed, cloud efficiency, and cost considerations. In terms of data security and privacy protection, public large models are inherently inadequate.

The second half of AI is about implementation. The pathways for implementation encompass the full-stack AI of smart devices, smart infrastructure, smart solutions, and services, which are the three pillars that Lenovo talks about.

For individual users, the most convenient path to obtaining smart devices with built-in personal intelligence is to integrate personal intelligence into their own personal computing devices such as computers and smartphones.

For enterprise customers, the implementation of AI must rely on smart infrastructure. The vast amount of data of each company, like "oil," is an important strategic resource that needs to be mined, transported, and refined. Therefore, companies require servers, networks, and storage devices to make the most of massive data.

In the future, AI will not only operate on public clouds but also on local data centers, private clouds, hybrid clouds, and even at the edge. Computational power will also be more evenly distributed between the cloud, edge, and endpoints. Thus, the implementation of enterprise intelligence requires hybrid infrastructure.

In simple terms, Lenovo believes that in the era of artificial intelligence, individual customers need personal intelligence, while enterprise customers require enterprise intelligent solutions.What are Lenovo's advantages?

Lenovo also discussed its advantages at the meeting.

In terms of individual users, Lenovo is the world's number one personal computer manufacturer, a leading tablet, smartphone, and AR/VR vendor. Lenovo can adopt its own model compression technology on new smart devices, standardize large models with smaller parameters, and combine them with natural language interaction, personal knowledge bases, and other technologies to form personal intelligent agents.

Moreover, Lenovo's vast global scale makes its devices a natural platform for carrying artificial intelligence applications. All participants in the AI ecosystem can leverage Lenovo's smart device platform.

In terms of enterprise customers, the implementation of enterprise intelligent agents requires hybrid infrastructure, which is the new IT technology architecture that Lenovo is fully committed to building. The design, deployment, and maintenance of hybrid infrastructure are more complex than traditional infrastructure. In response to this, Lenovo has established a professional AI services team to help enterprises build intelligent agents.

Apple, Huawei, Honor, what are the differences in each company's AI PCs?

 Huawei's AI PC Solution

Just a few days ago, Huawei has unveiled its own AI PC product, the Huawei MateBook X Pro. With a thickness of only 13.5 millimeters and a weight of just 980 grams, it is the only notebook within 1 kg to feature an Intel Core Ultra 9 high-performance processor.

The MateBook X Pro is the first to apply Huawei's PanGu large model. According to Richard Yu, under the influence of the PanGu large model, the AI summary function can quickly and accurately extract key information from text, audio, and video content.

Huawei's thinking on AI PCs starts from the origin of AI. As we all know, the three elements of AI are algorithms, data, and computing power. It is clear that an AI PC should also possess all three. Huawei believes that a true AI PC is a great model on the edge + the ability to integrate and fuse data on the edge + the integration of computing power on the edge and in the cloud, enabling the PC to become truly intelligent. Therefore, the MateBook X Pro launched by Huawei has three core competitive strengths: "intelligent perception," "smart connectivity," and "smart creation."

In terms of intelligent perception, the MateBook X Pro, equipped with advanced visual sensors and touch hardware, combined with AI capabilities such as intelligent interaction, algorithms, and scheduling, achieves intelligent perception of the environment, devices, and information.

In terms of smart connectivity, the Huawei MateBook X Pro, through its Super Device feature, has achieved seamless collaboration with devices such as smartphones, tablets, headphones, and smart screens in all directions. Devices are no longer single entities; they can serve as functional modules for each other, assist each other in capabilities, and share resources.

In terms of smart creation, applying the Huawei PanGu large model to notebook products allows for smart voice recording of tens of thousands of words of meeting content. The AI summary can analyze the content to intelligently form a one-sentence summary, extract keywords, and provide a full-text summary. Alternatively, with WPS AI, it is possible to achieve smart text formatting, dialogue operations for tables, and quickly convert mind maps to PPT with smart functions.Pricing section: Ultra 7 16GB/1TB version: 11,199 yuan; Ultra 7 32GB/1TB version: 12,499 yuan; Ultra 9 32GB/2TB version: 14,999 yuan.

Comparing with its predecessors, the MateBook X Pro 2024 basically maintains a similar configuration and pricing scheme as the previous generation, both above ten thousand yuan, which is still quite reasonable. Compared to the 17,999 yuan of Lenovo's flagship Yoga Book 9i notebook, it can be said that the cost-performance ratio is still present.

Honor's AI PC Solution

Honor's first AI PC was released in March, a month earlier than Huawei and Lenovo.

The MagicBook Pro 16 is the first AI PC released by Honor.

Honor mainly enhances the upcoming MagicBook Pro 16 with comprehensive AI technology in three aspects, as follows:

In AI hardware, including performance scheduling, intelligent temperature control, spatial audio, etc., it optimizes key factors affecting user experience such as PC performance, endurance, and portability;

In AI assistant, it integrates a powerful voice large model, equipped with Honor's voice assistant "YOYO Assistant", to help users complete semantic searches, document summaries, service recommendations, and assist in creation.

In AI interconnection, a new form of cross-screen interconnection, in addition to sharing across different terminals (network, camera, keyboard, and mouse), a trust ring has been newly added, reconstructing the interconnection experience.

In terms of pricing, the Honor MagicBook Pro 16 integrated graphics version starts at 6,199 yuan, with a special launch price of 5,999 yuan; the discrete graphics version starts at 8,999 yuan, with a special launch price of 8,799 yuan.Is Apple also joining the trend?

At the end of the article, the author still wants to mention Apple.

From Apple's recent movements, it also hopes to get involved in AI. According to informed sources, in order to boost its sluggish computer business, Apple is preparing to restructure the Mac product line, and equip its PC products with AI functions through the next generation of M4 chips.

The source revealed that the production of Apple's next generation M4 chip is nearing completion. The new chip will have at least three versions, and Apple hopes to use it to upgrade all of its Mac models. The first Mac computers equipped with the M4 chip are also expected to be unveiled before the end of the year.