Microsoft is hoping that AI will reinvigorate PC sales, but it also sees its new Copilot+ line of Windows computers as finally able to challenge the popularity of the Apple Silicon-powered Mac.

Why it matters: The Mac has gained significant market share in recent years, with Apple's chips giving the company an edge, but the long pendulum of personal-computing competition could be swinging back.

The big picture: New Qualcomm chips, based on Arm's architecture, help Microsoft better compete against Apple on performance and power consumption, while the new AI features give Microsoft-based PCs more clear differentiation from Apple's Macs than they have had in years.

• Microsoft is touting the new Qualcomm-powered Surface devices as offering nearly 60% better performance than an M3-powered Mac as well as 20% better battery life, all while costing $200 less.
• "People do buy on performance," Microsoft consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi tells Axios, adding, "We've not had the supremacy on performance in a long time, and now we are back."

Driving the news: Microsoft on Monday debuted the Copilot+ branding, along with a new Surface Pro tablet and Surface laptop, both running on Qualcomm chips and set to begin shipping next month.

• Microsoft's PC partners are also launching Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ laptops, with Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo and Samsung all unveiling new machines at yesterday's event.

The new Copilot+ PCs, in addition to lasting longer on a single charge, have new AI features powered by algorithms running on the machines.

• The signature novelty is a Recall function that uses AI to provide a timeline and searchable database of everything a user has viewed on their PC.
• Other AI features include a systemwide language translator that, on the fly, translates any spoken content into English.

Yes, but: Software compatibility has long been an issue for Windows machines running on Arm processors.

• However, Microsoft has been working hard to get more software to run natively on Arm-based computers. It's also delivering a new emulation layer, dubbed Prism.
• Mehdi says Prism runs fast enough that most people won't notice a difference from the same app running on an Intel-based PC.

Context: Qualcomm and Microsoft have been working together for Windows on Arm for years, but the new chips — based on Qualcomm's Nuvia acquisition — are the first to offer enough performance to realistically compete with either the Mac or Intel-based PCs.

• In many ways, Qualcomm's latest chips are worse news for Intel than for Apple, both because the once-dominant chipmaker has the most to lose and because its products suffer even more than Apple's in some comparisons.

One test that Qualcomm and Microsoft had running on a loop in a demo room on Monday compared battery life among a Qualcomm-powered Copilot+ PC, an M3 MacBook Air and an Intel-powered Surface Laptop 5.

• While the Copilot+ edged out the MacBook Air, it far outlasted the Intel-based Surface laptop.

Intel, for its part, touted its upcoming laptop chip, codenamed Lunar Lake.

• Lunar Lake meets the specifications to power Copilot+ PCs, and will begin showing up on computers in the third quarter of this year.
• Intel says 80 laptop designs from 20 different PC makers are in the works using Lunar Lake.

The dispute between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI is adding fresh heat to long-simmering questions about CEO Sam Altman's credibility.

Why it matters: Altman and OpenAI, the company avowedly dedicated to making sure that AI "benefits humanity," have to persuade a skeptical world that AI can be trusted — and that will be a lot harder if they lose trust themselves.

Flashback: Altman won an epic boardroom fight last fall against directors who fired him because they said he was "not consistently candid" with them.

• At the time, it was a puzzling explanation for an abrupt dismissal — but a growing chorus of critics is now saying, "Oh, this is what you were talking about."

Driving the news: OpenAI and Altman continue to insist that ChatGPT's female voice named "Sky" wasn't modeled on Johansson's, which famously represented an AI assistant in the celebrated 2013 movie "Her."

• But Johansson said Monday that Altman had twice approached her to model the voice herself — a relevant bit of evidence that the company never shared.

The Sky mess followed a week that saw the disbanding of a "superalignment" team at OpenAI dedicated to researching long-term risks of advanced AI.

• At the same time, the team's two leaders — OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — left the firm.
• Sutskever was among the board members who voted to fire Altman before an about-face, in which he signed the nearly unanimous open letter from OpenAI employees demanding Altman's return.
• Leike blasted the company on his way out, saying "safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products."

The intrigue: Vox reported that OpenAI's "extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement" requires departing employees to keep mum with criticism of the firm or even mentions of the agreement itself. If they don't sign, they risk losing their vested stock options.

• After Vox published its story, Altman posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that "we have never clawed back anyone's vested equity," that he didn't know about the harsh terms and was "genuinely embarrassed," and that the exit agreements would be changed.

Yes, but: While some critical voices on X and elsewhere have begun to call for Altman's resignation, that's unlikely to happen unless his troubles dramatically deepen.

• The company's new board, reconstituted after the fight last year, is also much less likely than its predecessors were to challenge him.

The big picture: Altman and OpenAI have had to do a lot of explaining and backtracking of late. But the most important matter the company continues to equivocate around is what data it has used to train its AI models.

• In a widely criticized Wall Street Journal interview in March, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said she didn't know whether the company had used YouTube videos to train its Sora video-making tool.
• "We used publicly available data and licensed data," Murati said.
• As Axios has written, "publicly available data" can mean almost anything.

What we're watching: OpenAI and the wider AI industry could defuse a lot of this distrust by sharing more about the training data they use.

• But transparency would backfire if they reveal they really did use huge amounts of copyrighted material.
• One reason these companies prefer to settle conflicts like Johansson's rather than fight them in court is that trials can pry loose information the firms would rather keep close.

• Humane Inc., maker of the poorly reviewed AI Pin, is looking for a buyer. (Bloomberg)
• Computing pioneer Gordon Bell, whom I mentioned in a story yesterday, died Friday at the age of 89. (NYT)
• Abu Dhabi-based G42 and Microsoft are investing $1 billion in Kenya, funding a Microsoft Azure data center and an open-source large language model in Swahili and English. (Reuters)
• Amazon says it's using AI to save energy. (Axios)

Microsoft used font names to label the press meeting rooms at this week's Build Conference.