A few days ago, we shared that Microsoft’s CEO had acknowledged the success of Depseek, the new open-source AI application from China, and highlighted that it’s time to pay more attention to developments outside the United States.
Now, in a surprising turn, it has been revealed that Microsoft plans to bring optimized versions of Depseek R1 to its Copilot+ PC systems. This is quite fascinating, as it opens up various possibilities for future integrations. The official details of this move have been published on the Windows Developers Blog.
Microsoft has announced some optimized models of Deepseek R1 for Copilot+ PC equipment
Deepseek has quickly emerged as one of the biggest surprises in the AI tool landscape in recent days. In fact, it has surpassed ChatGPT in the U.S. application store, which is quite remarkable given that ChatGPT had been the leading reference in this area.
Now, Microsoft has announced plans to bring optimized versions of Deepseek R1 to its Copilot+ PC systems, which is exciting and opens up new possibilities. Initially, these optimized models will be available for systems with Snapdragon X chips, followed by Intel’s Lake Lake processors and, eventually, AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 processors.
As for the models to be used, the Deepseek-R1-Distill-QWen-1.5b will be available first and can be installed using Microsoft’s AI toolkit. Over time, variants with 7b and 14b models will also be released. However, it’s important to note that these features require systems with at least 256 GB of storage, 16 GB of RAM, and an NPU with a minimum of 40 TOPs, so some devices may not be able to run them locally.
In its official blog post, Microsoft explained that they’ve been working on optimizing the execution of R1 models for NPU-based systems to ensure they can run efficiently and locally. It’s clear that Microsoft has been focused on refining these tools to work smoothly on NPU-powered devices, which is a notable effort.
What’s also fascinating is Microsoft’s strategic move to embrace the Deepseek language model, especially at a time when many other tech companies in the U.S. have been concerned by its presence and the financial losses it has caused. This is a big step forward for Microsoft, as they aim to enhance their systems with powerful AI capabilities.
