Microsoft wants to run Copilot locally on your PC starting early 2025

Microsoft will bring Phi Silica to the Windows runtime this quarter as part of Copilot, according to Microsoft’s head of Windows devices, who presented on Monday at CES 2025 in Las Vegas.

Microsoft debuted Phi Silica at its Build conference in Seattle last May, showing off the Small Language Model (SLM) that’s meant to complement its Large Language Model (LLM) that runs in the cloud. Phi Silica paves the way for a local version of Copilot to run on Windows PCs.

Typically, LLMs are faster and more accurate than SLMs.