Let me ask you a few questions. Do you know about OpenAI? Have you heard of chat GPT and GPT-4? For many of you the answer I expect is yes. But did you know that Bing AI and Windows Copilot AI are provided by OpenAI? Did you know that Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI? Now what is not entirely clear to practically all of you is what does Microsoft intend to do with this massive investment in OpenAI? Is this supposed to be just about putting a GPT-4 like AI in Windows and that’s it? What I will reveal to you today is my assessment of this elaborate plan which would equip Microsoft with the tools for a new world order where Microsoft will be set to dominate tech again.

This is no minor move. The initial plays have been made and you’ve seen the introduction of things like Windows Recall and key logging into Windows 11. Most of you will think these are just features forced on us by Microsoft when there is no demand for them. You would think these moves to be haphazard. But wait till you hear what I think they have planned. If this doesn’t scare you to jump ship phone windows, I don’t know what will. Stay right there. I’ve seen other videos now on what other cybersecurity people think about the new Windows 11 features like Windows Recall and although most of us have similar conclusions I think the operational details as analyzed by others have been lacking in understanding.

What Microsoft has planned has never been clear to me but the fact is that most people will sweep the concerns I have under the rug and will tout whatever supposed benefits they will gain in capability. And what I will describe today is ultra dangerous and may bring in a world manipulated by the AI itself. This puts some real truth to pundits who think that AI could be the cause of human extinction. Microsoft apparently wants to be part of that. Let me explain this all carefully for you. The clues began seeping in when we found the three new features in Windows 11.

Copilot is the true AI replacement to Cortana. Cortana wasn’t really a full AI like the Xbox game but was more of a language-enabled search engine. Copilot is of course a large language model AI or LLM and is just a tweaked version of chat GPT. It is meant to supersede your actual independent research since the AI will understand what you want and do research for you based on the accumulated knowledge it has. Now this is an important point. Copilot is a huge LLM AI. It did its machine learning on massive databases and CPUs which is still continuing to this day under the auspices of its developer open AI.

What I want to make clear to you today and the importance of this will be apparent later is that copilot is not your personal AI. Do not ever think that because you can ask copilot questions that it is your personal AI servant. The copilot queries you send are processed at Microsoft servers. If all the people who currently use Bing and Windows Copilot are thinking that they have their own AI, think more clearly. It is a single server that knows all. It knows all the interactions with all people that use it.

Windows Recall has been generally understood by many as the new capability of Windows 11 to capture what you are doing every five seconds or so using screenshots and the idea is that these screenshots were supposed to be stored in a rotating storage of screenshots with a lifespan of three months. At least that’s what most tech analysts seem to think. Generally this feature is disturbing in itself and most will ask why would Microsoft introduce such a privacy invading feature that no one is asking for and one that apparently some hackers have already figured out how to extract from your computer and because of the behemoth that Microsoft is they can force anything on its users and they know that so you will have no choice but to participate in this Windows Recall the intent of which is of course for Windows to know everything you do.

Supposedly then you can query a timeline and Windows can recall what you did when using this specific database it builds based on your history but the misunderstanding is that this is all about screenshots. Yet if you listen closely Windows Recall is a feature available only on PCs with an AI chip which now uses the moniker NPU or neural processing unit. So new computers will have a CPU and of course many know about the GPU graphics processing unit and now you will have the NPU. Today as of the time of this video I only see one brand of computers at the store with an NPU and these are Microsoft Surface Pro laptops.

There will be many coming out shortly and they will be supported by all computer makers. The first Windows compatible chip made with an NPU comes from Qualcomm with the chip name Snapdragon X Elite. These are powering the new Windows 11 machines that have Windows Recall but by the end of the year Intel and AMD will release their versions of computers with NPUs so this will be global. Every new computer will have an NPU chip. Given the life cycle of computers in five years it is likely that the majority of running computers will have an NPU.

Now Apple already has the neural engine on iPhones and it’s equivalent on Apple Silicon Macs so Apple was ahead in introducing AI chips to computers but hear me out here. Microsoft’s plan use of these NPUs will overcome the fairly mild use of NPUs by Apple. Microsoft’s approach is incredibly massive and dangerous. I will get into what NPUs actually do in a moment but let me first continue with the Windows 11 features. It’s been three weeks now I think since Microsoft force-fed key logging on me on Windows 11. I don’t have a computer with an NPU yet so I have no personal experience with Windows Recall but key logging is definitely here or what Microsoft will nicely refer to as activity history.

Key logging is now when Windows records everything you do on the computer. There’s no doubt that this is occurring even without a Windows Recall and I can see the results of it in the Windows Start menu. They force this on us by default and that’s because they know that if they gave you a choice you would not use this. But this is a very important provision in their AI project so it is key that Windows start recording everything you do. Again like Windows Recall this is one of those super invading features that you did not ask for and unless you have Alzheimer’s you definitely do not need to have Windows remember your own timeline.

I’m sure you can remember what you did on your own computer. So once again people are thinking this was added without forethought and that Microsoft just made a misguided decision to add this in. But it is not misguided. Microsoft needs all these features to do an end run around Google and Apple. It will be the primary power of Microsoft AI over its competitors if it gets its way. In the features it needs to do this are Copilot, Windows Recall, key logging, and the NPU. So let me first explain the NPU.

Of course we’ve already heard of the neural engine on iPhones which was the first appearance of the NPU. Then there was the Apple Silicon M1 to M4 Max, the Google Tensor chip on pixels, and now the NPU in Windows based computers called Copilot plus PCs. So with the inclusion of Windows all personal computers sold in the coming years will have NPUs. This may not be needed on servers but it may be cheaper for the makers to just leave the NPU in there even if not used. Now what is the NPU for? Why have an AI chip on a local computer? This is the misunderstanding here.

The current batch of NPUs are not suited for use as a large language model. So these NPUs cannot run as local versions or personal versions of chat TPT. They’re not powerful enough for that. What these NPUs do is image processing. They are image processing AIs. They can do image processing locally instead of having to send photos and videos to a central server to process. Let’s talk about the capabilities of NPUs. This can be used for facial recognition. That can be used to identify objects in a photo. That can be used to determine emotions based on facial details.

Like it can determine if people are anxious, scared, happy, angry, and so on. NPUs can detect the environment in a photo. They can see what people are wearing or what animals are in the photo. NPUs can also examine the actions of the objects in the photo and be able to determine things like a moving car, people playing basketball, soldiers shooting at each other, babies playing with toys, in a lot of detail. And of course it can easily see what you’re doing on your screen if it gets to examine screenshots.

Previously these types of processes were handled in massive servers. For example, YouTube examines every frame of every video we upload and then the server AI will perform moderation functions to see if we conform to YouTube community guidelines. Now this can be done by the local neural chip. Local AI can analyze images and state what’s going on in these images. By local it means the NPU does not need to send the images to a central server causing massive traffic if everyone’s photos in the world need to be analyzed this way.

What the NPU can do is pre-examine photos and then store the characteristics of the photos in text form. For example, it can enumerate all the objects found in the image and the context of the image. So this I think is the main misunderstanding with Windows Recall. It was assumed that Windows Recall would need to allow for massive amounts of space like the stated 50 gigabyte requirement to record your actions every five seconds. But this would not be the case if the NPU performed its function and just summarized what it found in every photo.

I believe that some hackers have already verified that they have found these text files containing this data, though at the moment this is only preview mode on Windows and may be encrypted later. This of course is not a new concept since I explained this before as the logic for Apple’s neural engine and how it was intended to be used for client-side scanning. In that case excuse was that the NPU was to be used for spotting illegal image content on your machine. In the case of Windows, Microsoft isn’t even trying to justify why Windows Recall or keylogging exists.

It’s just saying it is there to generate history or a timeline of your activities in Windows. So as I discussed so far, Microsoft wants to record a timeline of things you do on your computer. However you will notice it is absolute. The computer will have a complete history of everything you do both as text or keyboard input or its mouse clicks in the new key logging feature. Then in addition if you have a timeline of what you’ve done, but also what’s been shown to you, just understand the completeness of this model.

You click a URL on a website. Windows knows that. Windows then can use the NPU to examine what was returned to you on the screen. Think of the power of seeing both the input and the output and then understanding the context as seen by the NPU. Now given enough time you can see the absolute profoundness of what will have happened here. Your computer would clearly know your every thought from knowing anything that your computer has seen you do. For the moment you can see how the marketing people of Microsoft are presenting this.

It is all local data available only to you. Yes Windows is in fact tracking everything you do and it is in fact compiling this into something that can be understood in context in a timeline, but they will claim everything is local and thus subject to your control. But is it really under your control? So some of the examples given for a Windows user to get utility out of this data is that supposedly you can query Windows, meaning co-pilot, and that it will be able to tell you what you were doing at a specific timeline.

Is that it? Such a massive effort using NPU chips and it ends there? Is that the end goal? Well of course if that’s the goal then it would sound ultra-stupid of one of the biggest tech behemoths. One controlling the most popular operating system in the world. No that is not the role of co-pilot. Reminding you again when you ask co-pilot anything it will not be your local large language model AI. Co-pilot is at the server side. Co-pilot exists on huge Microsoft machines. Co-pilot is a single computing entity. Co-pilot is Microsoft’s version of Skynet.

Now here’s the kicker here. Co-pilot can read your entire history of computing as recorded by your computer. When you ask co-pilot of some event in your timeline it is co-pilot on the Microsoft central server analyzing your local content to tell you what you did. This is the shallow explanation of its use. The real use is that because of the accumulated behaviors on your computer, co-pilot will have a summary of your profile and of what you think, your political side, your food choices, your sexual preferences, your attitudes, your relationships, and your community.

This will be apparent from the constant key logging which if you forgot can record everything you do including what you say in encrypted apps. Remember that Windows Recall is pre-encryption. Windows will know all about you. Windows will in fact know if you’re a criminal. Windows will know your poor usage. Windows will know your religious fervor. Windows will know all the people you know. And Windows will pass this information on to co-pilot anytime you have a question. Co-pilot will then be ultra powerful because it will appear to be your personal AI.

On another YouTube channel, a cybersecurity guru referred to this personal AI as intoxicating as a concept. Your personal AI to function based on your preferences. Except it is not personal. It will only use your personal data as part of its large language model. You are merely a data bank and you will be fooled into thinking it is personal. In my case, the AI will try to get me tickets to Herbie Hancock concerts, probably because I love Herbie Hancock. It may even already know Herbie Hancock status since Herbie’s computer will also be known to co-pilot.

It is one massive database, not your personal database in your own large language model. Herbie Hancock is getting up there in years. The AI would probably push me to buy his tickets even more aggressively if it has some deeper knowledge on Herbie’s health. And maybe it will be his last concert. Co-pilot would know that. The scary part is not obvious to most of you because the examples I give are benign. But if an AI can think on its own and has the data of every single person, albeit not stored on co-pilot’s servers, then what stops the AI from telling you things that would benefit the AI’s survival? What if OpenAI, which already is the basis of co-pilot, tries to influence or manipulate the opinions of billions of people who all think they are talking to a personal helper, who is running OpenAI and has influence over OpenAI? When the AI has knowledge of each person, that ability would have superior effectiveness compared to a general AI that has no personal history.

Currently, co-pilot is limited to a few questions today and retains no history of conversations. But now the history would actually be kept on your device. That would make this the most powerful AI available when this is fully implemented. Let me just make this clear. Currently, the Google Gemini project could also get access to your internet history via the Google database of your data. Google has a lot of data, but over time, knowing every click and everything displayed on your computer cannot be beat by Google. This is about as massive an information steal as I can imagine.

Folks, this is the kind of scary reality we face when the populace has the mantra of, I have nothing to hide. Well, don’t worry. Microsoft will make sure you really don’t have anything you can hide even if you wanted to. Although Apple was the first one to introduce the neural engine for image processing, Apple did not initially link this neural engine concept to a large language model AI. However, it is apparently doing the same as Microsoft, and I hear it is called Apple Intelligence. But Microsoft is doing it first. There’s more to this, but I’m giving you my current understanding of the Microsoft plan.

It’s pretty massive and my fear is the kind of AI use that is not completely understood and it’s fraught with dangers, dangers where even Microsoft and open AI may not even know what the AI is doing in the big picture sense, a subject for more discussion later on. I don’t know about you, but we have to plan on leaving the Microsoft ecosystem completely, maybe just leaving my test computers. This concept is out of control. We have to plan our way out now. Folks, while we can, we have to keep our data away from big tech because they will misuse it like Google and Microsoft can with AI.

I created a company with tools to protect us from this data collection. We have the Brax virtual phone which allows you to have phone numbers not tied to your identity. We have the identity-free D Google phones that are not trackable by big tech using telemetry. We also have the identity-free Brax mail service. We have bytes VPN to protect your personal IP address and Brax routers to protect your entire home. All these are on my app Brax me. Visit us there and join the over 100,000 people who exchange information about privacy. The store is accessible after you join.

Thank you for watching and see you next time. [tr:trw].

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.