Microsoft's AI-Powered Copy and Paste Can Now Use On-Device AI (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0180162775
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/21/1516219/microsofts-ai-powered-copy-and-paste-can-now-use-on-device-ai
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/news/825668/microsoft-advanced-paste-powertoys-on-device-ai
> Microsoft is upgrading its Advanced Paste tool in PowerToys for Windows 11, allowing you to [1]use an on-device AI model to power some of its features . With the 0.96 update, you can route requests through Microsoft's Foundry Local tool or the open-source Ollama, both of which run AI models on your device's neural processing unit (NPU) instead of connecting to the cloud.
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> That means you won't need to purchase API credits to perform certain actions, like having AI translate or summarize the text copied to your clipboard. Plus, you can keep your data on your device.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/825668/microsoft-advanced-paste-powertoys-on-device-ai
Summarize the text copied to your clipboard (Score:2)
I think they stopped listening to themselves long ago at this point.
An Obvious Development (Score:3)
They want everyone to use their AI tools.
Certain government, health care, and financial organizations are legally restricted from sharing data. Having worked in such a place before, they'll blanket ban AI rather than risk the unauthorized transmission of protected data. This functionality offers an alternative that they can accept.
If Microsoft wants their AI features to be adopted widely, they basically had no choice but to implement a local model. The fact that it's cheaper to use the customer's electricity is probably meaningless to them; they want to capture the userbase.
AI powered copy-paste? (Score:3, Insightful)
I see they mention translation, but that feels like a weird thing to want to do with a copy-paste. If I turn this on and copy some code from an older project and paste it into a new project, will it automatically refactor it into something that doesn't function but looks prettier? It just seems like copy-paste is one of the simplest, dumbest things a computer helps us with in a way that's unobtrusive. Is anyone asking for "smart" copy-paste beyond "paste as plain text?"
Wot? (Score:3)
US: Hey MS, we just wanna type in a text file, which app do I use?
MS: Well, you can use our AI Powered PowerText-to-SuperFile app. It does it all, writes your text for you.
US: No, no, no. We want to write the text.
MS: That's not the AI-Way, you really want to use our AI Powered app, it will answer any questions you have while it writes your text.
US: Errrrmmmm.....cannot I just write text file on my own?
MS: Uh-oh, I guess not. We do not have an AI Powered app to do that.
US: Nevermind, Linux and MacOS will do just fine. Now go away.
MS: Ooops, too late, our AI Powered Agent has already accessed you bank account and transferred the required sum into our coffers for wanting to use an un-AI Powered app.
US: Eat death!
MS: So you want to commit suicide. May we suggest our AI Powered Schedule-Your-Death app?
Great (Score:2, Insightful)
Now i can dry my battery even faster with just copy and pasting stuff
Any opportunity to fuck things up (Score:2)
I swear that's Microsoft's unofficial motto.
The Copy-Paste mechanism has been a well-defined, widely-understood basic action for personal computers since at least 1984, arguably before.
The defining characteristics are either duplicating or moving one or more digital objects to a new position in a document.
Notice those verbs. Nothing about rewriting/translating/making different. The closest the mechanism gets to that is, for inter-application transfer, there can be content negotiation to deal with forma
Better data leaks! (Score:3)
They will likely still listen to and record everything. The main difference is that you pay the power used. But now you have the illusion of the data staying on your device. Nice!
See also: [1]https://thehackernews.com/2025... [thehackernews.com]
[1] https://thehackernews.com/2025/10/new-research-ai-is-already-1-data.html
Re: Better data leaks! (Score:1)
"you pay the power used."
Will the difference be too insignificant to notice?
Re: (Score:2)
If only current AI was billed like this instead of pushing up the price of electricity for everyone. 'Pay for your energy use' would have killed current AI dead.
Additionally on a laptop you pay for local prompt execution by sucking the life out of the battery, users will notice.