The Monkey’s Paw Curls: Windows Is Finally Using My PC’s AI Processor

I’ve been using a Copilot+ PC from Asus for the last few months, and one of my favorite things to do with it is try out it’s many integrated AI features while I have Task Manager opened to the NPU page, so I can see how much Microsoft’s AI features hit the fancy NPU built into my laptop’s processor.

I’ve never seen it move. Not once.

Up until Tuesday, every one of Microsoft’s AI features that I’ve tried have always hit their cloud services, not the NPU that was a key requirement for laptops to be labeled “Copilot+ PCs”. That all changed when Windows Update installed KB5062553 on Tuesday.

I hit the Start button on my keyboard, typed “fire” and pressed Enter to launch Firefox, the same way I do every time I reboot a computer. But Firefox didn’t open. Instead, it stalled and eventually opened an Edge tab to a Bing search for “fire”.

“That’s weird,” I thought, because one of the first things I do on every time I setup a new Windows machine is disable Bing search in the Start Menu. That’s when I noticed the new icon.

Those twinkling stars and the slight animation when you click into it could only mean one thing. AI.

I opened Settings to see if there was an easy way to turn it off. I popped up to the search box and typed “Start” only to notice the same exact icon. A little swoop and some twinkling purple stars. It’s here too.

I figured this was part of a Windows Update, so I popped open the start menu again and typed “update”. The number 1 result was Discord (the executable for Discord is named DiscordUpdate.exe, so it makes sense, but it’s not the behavior I expected from the previous version) not Windows Update, which would have been the #1 in the old regime. I tried launching a few more apps. The AI search was slower and consistently less reliable. These are places that adding “context-aware” search is an active detriment to me. I know what I’m looking for, I know what it’s called, and I just want to have the least friction possible between the computer and me.

On a hunch, I popped open the Task Manager to the NPU pane and sure enough these searches were the first thing I’d really seen move the NPU’s usage needle. (The other usage I’d seen was using Windows Studio Effects, which blurs your webcam background and tracks your face, among other things.)

Microsoft calls this feature Semantic Search, and considers it a core part of Windows 11, so there’s no easy way to revert to the old functionality. It shows up in a few different places in Windows—the Start Menu, the Search box on the taskbar, Settings search, and Explorer’s file search.

After a few hours of testing, I’m frustrated that Microsoft isn’t letting us enable this new feature selectively. It’s incredibly useful for inside the contents of files, I was able to find photos based on their contents and the search inside documents worked better than it ever has before.

The Start menu search didn’t fare as well. After using it for a few more hours, the AI-assisted search is a huge net negative. It’s noticeably slower, it gives me Bing results when I search for applications that are on the PC, and it’s unnecessary. It’s an interface where my searches have zero ambiguity.

Settings search is also a regression. It’s another place where I actively prefer deterministic search. For me, it’s a shortcut to panels deep in the Settings app, rather than navigating an increasingly arbitrary tree. I neither expect nor want the search in Settings to try and help me solve problems with my PC.

I typically disable the Search box on the Taskbar, so I didn’t test it much. A quick look showed that it’s extremely similar to Explorer’s search.

The bummer about all of this is that Microsoft is taking an all-or-nothing approach to it. Because Microsoft views Semantic Search as a core part of Windows, they don’t provide an easy way to pick and choose where it’s enabled. While you can uninstall the core Copilot app and disable Copilot in Notepad (or use one of a bazillion great alternatives, like Notepad++), not providing users with an easy, reversible way to disable AI “enhancements” to a core OS feature seems like malpractice. They know it’s not good, there’s a disclaimer everywhere that it shows up and the OS asks you for feedback constantly when you use it.

When it comes down to it, I use the Start menu search dozens of times a day and search using Explorer at most once or twice a day. Having a Start menu search that opens an Edge window with Bing results for Slack when I just want to open Slack, an application on my computer, is not acceptable.

Disabling Semantic Search

The good news is that, for now at least, Semantic search is limited to computers that include a Copilot+ class NPU. That means it’s limited to a handful of laptops that came out in the last year. Your desktop PC won’t see this feature, even if it includes a dedicated GPU that can provide 10x the number of TOPS that the Copilot+ spec requires.

And if you do have one of those laptops, there’s an easy way to disable Semantic Search. Unfortunately, it seems to be irreversible. (I didn’t expect it to be a permanent change, so I tested ways to disable it before I grabbed all the screenshots I wanted, which is why I don’t have the usual complement of screenies here. Sorry about that.) Because the change was permanent, I didn’t get to test any of the other potential techniques I found using Group Policy Editor and Regedit.

So here’s how I permanently removed Semantic search from my Windows 11 Copilot+ laptop. Please don’t complain to me when you do this and you can’t turn it back on. This is courtesy of Reddit user PhantomOcean3, who pointed another user to vivetool. Vivetool give you an easy way to manipulate the A/B testing mechanisms that Microsoft has been using in Windows for the last few years. (Full disclosure: Semantic search will likely come back with a future update, but I haven’t been able to turn it back on in a current build and I’ve tried everything I know to do.)

Once you’ve downloaded vivetool and chucked it in a folder somewhere, all you need to do to permanently disable the AI-assisted search is to open an Administrator Powershell Terminal, navigate to the folder you unzipped vivetool into, and type ‘./vivetool /disable /id:47942714’. Reboot, and your local AI search will be replaced with the faster and more reliable deterministic search that’s been around since Windows 7.

What’s Next?

So anyway, I just went ahead and installed CachyOS on my laptop. I haven’t tried to run a Linux distro on a laptop in a really long time, but the process was painless and after a little bit of work I even managed to get fancy features, like my Windows Hello-style face authentication working in Linux. I’m a few days in, so there will be more soon, but for now, the way I use my laptop is much more conducive to a Linux lifestyle than my desktop, where I actively use Adobe applications and regularly play games that use anti-cheat that’s incompatible.

I’m still working out what the right cadence should be for these posts, so please bear with me while I figure out what’s sustainable. I’d rather miss a week than churn out something low effort nonsense just to keep to an arbitrary schedule. In the meantime, check out the video I just did over at PC World where I tested the performance impact that running a crapped up Windows install will cause. This video will shake the very foundations of your understanding of Windows.

Things I’ve enjoyed this week: the FunFactor Podcast digs into classic gaming magazines in a way that I love. Each episode, Aidan and Ty dive into a different magazine issue, but my favorite so far was Nintendo Power #88, aka the issue where they unveiled Super Mario 64. I wasn’t a subscriber by that point, but the game was such a big deal I went out and bought a copy at the newsstand.