Technologies

Intel’s Next PC Chip, Meteor Lake, Will Speed Up AI Later This Year

The new processor is key to the chipmaker’s recovery plans and competing against Apple’s M series of Mac processors.

Today’s most glamorous, attention-getting AI tools — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, Google’s Bard and Adobe’s Photoshop, for example — run in data centers stuffed with powerful, expensive servers. But Intel on Monday revealed details of its forthcoming Meteor Lake PC processor that could help your laptop play more of a part in the artificial intelligence revolution.

Meteor Lake, scheduled to ship in computers later this year, includes circuitry that accelerates some AI tasks that otherwise might sap your battery. For example, it can improve AI that recognizes you to blur or replace backgrounds better during videoconferences, said John Rayfield, leader of Intel’s client AI work.

AI models use methods inspired by human brains to recognize patterns in complex, real-world data. By running AI on a laptop or phone processor instead of in the cloud, you can get benefits like better privacy and security as well as a snappier response since you don’t have network delays.

What’s unclear is how much AI work will really move from the cloud to PCs. Some software, like Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, use AI extensively for finding people, skies and other subject matter in photos and many other image editing tasks. Apps can recognize your voice and transcribe it into text. Microsoft is building an AI chatbot called Windows Copilot straight into its operating system. But most computing work today exercises more traditional parts of a processor, its central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU) cores.

There’s a build-it-and-they-will come possibility. Adding AI acceleration directly into the chip, as has already happened with smartphone processors and Apple M-series Mac processors, could encourage developers to write more software drawing on AI abilities.

GPUs are already pretty good for accelerating AI, though, and developers don’t have to wait for millions of us to upgrade our Windows PCs to take advantage of it. The GPU offers top AI performance on a PC, but the new AI-specific accelerator is good for low power, Rayfield said. Both can be used simultaneously for top performance, too.

Meteor Lake a key chip for Intel

Meteor Lake is important for other reasons, too. It’s designed for lower power operations, arguably the single biggest competitive weakness compared with the Apple M-series processors. It’s got upgraded graphics acceleration, which is critical for gaming and important for some AI tasks, too.

The processor also is key to Intel’s yearslong turnaround effort. It’s the first big chip to be built with Intel 4, a new manufacturing process essential to catching up with chipmaking leaders Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung. And it employs new advanced manufacturing technology called Foveros that lets Intel stack multiple «chiplets» more flexibly and economically into a single more powerful processor.

Chipmakers are racing to tap into the AI revolution, few as successfully as Nvidia, which earlier in May reported a blowout quarter thanks to exploding demand for its highest-end AI chips. Intel sells data center AI chips, too, but has more of a focus on economy than performance.

In its PC processors, Intel calls its AI accelerator a vision processing unit, or VPU, a product family and name that stems from its 2016 acquisition of AI chipmaker Movidius.

These days, a variation called generative AI can create realistic imagery and human-sounding text. Although Meteor Lake can run one such image generator, Stable Diffusion, large AI language models like ChatGPT simply don’t fit on a laptop.

There’s a lot of work to change that, though. Facebook’s LLaMA and Google’s PaLM 2 both are large language models designed to scale down to smaller «client» devices like PCs and even phones with much less memory.

«AI in the cloud … has challenges with latency, privacy, security, and it’s fundamentally expensive,» Rayfield said. «Over time, as we can improve compute efficiency, more of this is migrating to the client.»

Technologies

Meta Is Shutting Down Its Mac and Windows Messenger Apps. What You Need to Know

Here’s what you need to do before the apps disappear at the end of the year.

If you use the desktop Messenger apps for Windows and Mac, you need to know that they’re disappearing soon. Meta is discontinuing the apps starting Dec. 15, when you’ll need to head to Facebook to continue chatting through the app on your computer.

Once the sundowning process begins, you’ll receive an in-app notification. You’ll have a 60-day window to continue using Messenger before the app is permanently shut down. (But don’t worry — the mobile app for Messenger will remain.)

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If you want to save your chat history, Meta suggests activating secure storage before the app is gone forever. Otherwise, your chat history will be gone forever, as well.

The Messenger desktop app is no longer available on the Apple App Store. After Dec. 15, Meta users who try to access Messenger on desktop will be redirected to Facebook.com. Users without a Facebook account will be redirected to Messenger.com.

Technologies

This New Humanoid Home Robot Costs $20K, and You Still Have to Train It

The Neo robot from 1X is designed to do household chores, but it’s got a lot of learning still to do.

It stands 5 feet, 6 inches tall, weighs about as much as a golden retriever and costs near the price of a brand-new budget car.

This is Neo, the humanoid robot. It’s billed as a personal assistant you can talk to and eventually rely on to take care of everyday tasks, such as loading the dishwasher and folding laundry.

Neo doesn’t work cheap. It’ll cost you $20,000. And even then, you’ll still have to train this new home bot.

If that sounds enticing, preorders are now open (for a mere $200 down). You’ll be signing up as an early adopter for what Neo’s maker, a California-based company called 1X, is calling a «consumer-ready humanoid.» That’s opposed to other humanoids under development from the likes of Tesla and Figure, which are, for the moment at least, more focused on factory environments.

Neo is a whole order of magnitude different from robot vacuums like those from Roomba, Eufy and Ecovacs, and embodies a long-running sci-fi fantasy of robot maids and butlers doing chores and picking up after us. If this is the future, read on for more of what’s in store.

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What the Neo robot can do around the house

The pitch from 1X is that Neo can do all manner of household chores: fold laundry, run a vacuum, tidy shelves, bring in the groceries. It can open doors, climb stairs and even act as a home entertainment system.

Neo appears to move smoothly, with a soft, almost human-like gait, thanks to 1X’s tendon-driven motor system that gives it gentle motion and impressive strength. The company says it can lift up to 154 pounds and carry 55 pounds, but it is quieter than a refrigerator. It’s covered in soft materials and neutral colors, making it look less intimidating than metallic prototypes from other companies.

The company says Neo has a 4-hour runtime. Its hands are IP68-rated, meaning they’re submersible in water. It can connect via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 5G. For conversation, it has a built-in LLM, the same sort of AI technology that powers ChatGPT and Gemini.

The primary way to control the Neo robot will be by speaking to it, just as if it were a person in your home.

Still, Neo’s usefulness today depends heavily on how you define useful. The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern got an up-close look at Neo at 1X’s headquarters and found that, at least for now, it’s largely teleoperated, meaning a human often operates it remotely using a virtual-reality headset and controllers.

«I didn’t see Neo do anything autonomously, although the company did share a video of Neo opening a door on its own,» Stern wrote.

1X CEO Bernt Børnich told her that Neo will do most things autonomously in 2026, though he also acknowledged that the quality «may lag at first.»

What you need to know about Neo and privacy

Part of what early adopters are signing up for is to let Neo learn from their environment so that future versions can operate more independently.

That learning process raises privacy and trust questions. The robot uses a mix of visual, audio and contextual intelligence — meaning it can see, hear and remember interactions with users throughout their homes.

«If you buy this product, it is because you’re OK with that social contract,» Børnich told the Journal. «It’s less about Neo instantly doing your chores and more about you helping Neo learn to do them safely and effectively.»

1X says it’s taking steps to protect your privacy: Neo listens only when it recognizes it’s being addressed, and its cameras will blur out humans. You can restrict Neo from entering or viewing specific areas of your home, and the robot will never be teleoperated without owner approval, the company says.

But inviting an AI-equipped humanoid to observe your home life isn’t a small step.

The first units will ship to customers in the US in 2026. There is a $499 monthly subscription alternative to the $20,000 full-purchase price, though that will be available at an unspecified later date. A broader international rollout is promised for 2027.

Neo’s got a long road ahead of it to live up to the expectations set by Rosie the Robot in The Jetsons way back when. But this is no Hanna-Barbera cartoon. What we’re seeing now is a much more tangible harbinger of change.