MS’s Claim... A Lie!
Well... yeah. I mean... yeah.
Does anyone out there really believe this?
Come on. It's like a bad infomercial: "Buy one Xbox One and we'll throw in 300,000 XBOX ONES FOR FREE!" I can potentially see some applications for this, but in Call of Duty? No way. In Assassin's Creed? Nope. For what?
Does anyone really think their Xbox needs to outsource the AI of childishly simplistic bots that point and shoot, or the physics on some crappy ragdolls, or the corona on some meaningless lens flare? Or that it's feasible to package up the world state of your game, shove it all off onto the internet, wait for it to arrive at the server, wait for it to get queued up and processed, wait for it to get packaged back up and shoved back on the interwebs, received, unpacked, processed, and finally output to your screen?
It's just not useful for 99.999% of games, even if Microsoft is building a massive server farm.
Maybe someone will come up with some crazy MMO or some nice persistent state world, where it actually will be useful to do a lot of off-console processing and all, but right now? Complete BS.
And the likelihood of someone actually making some crazy persistent state world that does lots of crazy AI stuff is further unlikely. We have the ability to do persistent state worlds and crazy AI RIGHT NOW, and we have for years. Universities were doing crazy AI experiments in the 80s. The reason we don't have an AI focus right now is because it's easier to put a vest on a dog, fill your game with cutscenes and explosions, and go ONLINE MULTIPLAYER DEATHMATCH. Boom, 20 million copies sold.