from https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-recall-ai-privacy-nightmare-security-roundup/
Microsoft’s New Recall AI Tool May Be a ‘Privacy Nightmare’
Following the trend of tech companies in the AI race throwing privacy and caution to the wind, Microsoft unveiled plans this week to launch a tool on its forthcoming Copilot+ PCs called Recall that takes screenshots of its customers’ computers every few seconds. Microsoft says the tool is meant to give people the ability to “find the content you have viewed on your device.” The company also claims to have a range of protections in place and says the images are only stored locally in an encrypted drive, but the response has been roundly negative nonetheless, with some watchdogs reportedly calling it a possible “privacy nightmare.” The company notes that an intruder would need a password and physical access to the device to view any of the screenshots, which should rule out the possibility of anyone with legal concerns ever adopting the system. Ironically, Recall’s description sounds eerily reminiscent of computer monitoring software the FBI has used in the past. Microsoft even acknowledges that the system takes no steps to redact passwords or financial information.
I pulled this from another source as this one looked like clickbait.
Recall is one of several new AI features that are going to require a Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is a special kind of processor that has been optimized for machine learning and artificial intelligence operations. Microsoft showcased several Copilot Plus laptops designed around Arm processors with dedicated NPUs that are ideal for AI applications like Recall.
So basically this means you need a NPU cpu built for AI to use this.
To further expound on why this would be hard to integrate on all existing computers is simply AI like this would need your whole cpu for a single image and it might take 1-5 minutes to analyze. A gpu would be seconds but the whole thing would spin up and get hot. A NPU could do this while your cpu does other things but it’s possible that this will be very power hungry like just a cpu or gpu.