[HN Gopher] Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
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Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs
Author : mossTechnician
Score : 340 points
Date : 2026-01-07 15:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| alexb_ wrote:
| Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock
| tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell
| shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk
| about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's
| correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies
| are mainly focusing on.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| To be fair, Dell has bigger, more fundamental threats out on
| the horizon right now than consumers not wanting AI.
|
| Making consumers want things is fixable in any number of ways.
|
| Tariffs?..
|
| Supply chain issues in a fracturing global order?..
|
| .. not so much. Only a couple ways to fix those things, and
| they all involve nontrivial investments.
|
| Even longer term threats are starting to look more plausible
| these days.
|
| Lot of unpredictability out there at the moment.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Should have stayed private. Then they wouldn't have to care
| what investors think.
| rchaud wrote:
| The whole point of going private is to make the private
| equity partners a boatload of money by going public again in
| the future.
| weird_trousers wrote:
| Finally companies understand that consumers do not want AI
| products, but just better, stronger, and cheaper products.
|
| Unfortunately investors are not ready to hear that yet...
| neilsimp1 wrote:
| I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the
| current AI craze in my life, at all.
|
| But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and
| vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are
| developers that like this sort of thing.
|
| I cannot explain this.
| walterbell wrote:
| https://www.alphanome.ai/post/talking-your-book-the-
| controve...
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Partly it's these people all trying to make money selling AI
| tools to each other, and partly there's a lot of people who
| want to take shortcuts to learning and productivity without
| thinking or caring about long term consequences, and AI
| offers that.
| afavour wrote:
| I see using AI for coding as a little different. I'm
| producing something that is designed for a machine to consume
| and react to. Code is the means by which I express my aims to
| the machine. With AI there's an extra layer of machine that
| transforms my written aims into a language any machine can
| understand. I'm still ambivalent about it, I'm proud of my
| code. I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that
| feels alien to me. But it's also undeniable that AI has sped
| up a bunch of the boring grunt work I have to do in projects.
| You can write, say, an OpenAPI spec, some tests and tell the
| AI to do the rest. It's very, very far from perfect but it
| remains very useful.
|
| But the fact remains that I'm producing something for a
| machine to consume. When I see people using AI to e.g. write
| e-mails for them that's where I object: that's communication
| intended for humans. When you fob that off onto a machine
| something important is lost.
| nottorp wrote:
| > I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels
| alien to me.
|
| It's okay, you'll just forget you were ever able to know
| your code :)
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I've already forgotten most assembly languages I ever
| used. I look forward to forgetting C++.
| nottorp wrote:
| Last part is very common, but what's wrong with assembly
| languages?
|
| But I wasn't talking about forgetting one language or
| another, i was talking about forgetting to program
| completely.
| blibble wrote:
| > I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this
| sort of thing.
|
| this is their aim, along with rabbiting on about
| "inevitability"
|
| once you drop out of the SF/tech-oligarch bubble the advocacy
| drops off
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _I cannot explain this._
|
| That usually means _you 're_ missing something, not that
| everyone else is.
| kevinh wrote:
| Sometimes, but I didn't get sucked into the
| crypto/blockchain/NFT hype and feel like that was the right
| call in hindsight.
| RevEng wrote:
| Even as a principal software developer and someone who is
| skeptical and exhausted with the AI hype, AI IDEs can be
| useful. The rule I give to my coworkers is: use it where you
| know what to write but want to save time doing it. Unit tests
| are great for this. Quick demos and test benches are great.
| Boilerplate and glue are great for this. There are lots of
| places where trivial, mind-numbing work can be done quickly
| and effortlessly with an AI. These are cases where it's
| actually making life better for the developer, not replacing
| their expertise.
|
| I've also had luck with it helping with debugging. It has the
| knowledge of the entire Internet and it can quickly add
| tracing and run debugging. It has helped me find some nasty
| interactions that I had no idea were a thing.
|
| AI certainly has some advantages in certain use cases, that's
| why we have been using AI/ML for decades. The latest wave of
| models bring even more possibilities. But of course, it also
| brings a lot of potential for abuse and a lot of hype. I,
| too, all quite sick of it all and can't wait for the bubble
| to burst so we can get back to building effective tools
| instead of making wild claims for investors.
| brailsafe wrote:
| I think you've captured how I feel about it too. If I try
| to go beyond the scopes you've described, with Cursor in my
| case and a variety of models, I often end up wasting time
| unless it's a purely exploratory request.
|
| "This package has been removed, grep for string X and
| update every reference in the entire codebase" is a great
| conservative task; easy to review the results, and I
| basically know what it should be doing and definitely don't
| want to do it.
|
| "Here's an ambiguous error, what could be the cause?"
| sometimes comes up with nonsense, but sometimes actually
| works.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If you develop software you can't be as productive without an
| LLM as a competitor or coworker can be with one.
| nottorp wrote:
| The "AI" gold rush pays a lot. So they're trying to present
| themselves as "AI" experts so they can demand those "AI" gold
| rush salaries.
| ashleyn wrote:
| If the AI-based product is suitable for purpose (whatever "for
| purpose" may mean), then it doesn't need to be marketed first
| and foremost as "AI". This strikes me as pandering more to
| investors than consumers, and even signaling that you don't
| value the consumers you sell to, or that you regard the
| company's stock as more of the product than the actual product.
|
| I can see a trend of companies continuing to use AI, but
| instead portraying it to consumers as "advanced search",
| "nondeterministic analysis", "context-aware completion", etc -
| the things you'd actually find useful that AI does very well.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| It's basically being used as "see, we keep up with the times"
| label, as there is plenty of propaganda that basically goes
| "move entirely to using AI for everything or you're obsolete"
| m000 wrote:
| The problem is that there are virtually no off-the-shelf local
| AI applications. So they're trying to sell us _expensive_
| hardware with no software that takes advantage of it.
| ehnto wrote:
| Yes it's a surprising marketing angle. What are they
| expecting people to run on these machines? Do they expect
| your average joe to pop into the terminal and boot up ollama?
|
| Anyone technical enough to jump into local AI usage can
| probably see through the hardware fluff, and will just get
| whatever laptop has the right amount of VRAM.
|
| They are just hoping to catch the trend chasers out, selling
| them hardware they won't use, confusing it as a requirement
| for using ChatGPT in the browser.
| janalsncm wrote:
| To be fair Ollama does have a GUI.
| lugu wrote:
| There is also https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-
| in.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> What we 've learned over the course of this year, especially
| from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI ..
| In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them
| understand a specific outcome._
|
| Do consumers understand that OEM device price increases are due
| to AI-induced memory price spike over 100%?
| whalesalad wrote:
| I'm kind of excited about the revival of XPS. The new hardware
| sounds pretty compelling. I have been longing for a macbook-
| quality device that I can run Linux on... so eagerly awaiting
| this.
| thesh4d0w wrote:
| I owned a couple XPS 13 laptops in a row and liked them a lot,
| until I got one with a touch bar. I returned it after a couple
| weeks and swapped over the to X1 Carbon.
|
| The return back to physical buttons makes the XPS look pretty
| appealing again.
| xcjs wrote:
| This is exactly what I was hoping to see. I also returned one
| I ordered with the feedback that I needed physical function
| keys and the touchbar just wasn't cutting it for me.
| rationalist wrote:
| Sweet, TIL!
|
| I love my 2020 XPS.
|
| The keyboard keys on mine do not rattle, but I have seen newer
| XPS keyboard keys that do rattle. I hope they fixed that.
| m348e912 wrote:
| Protip, if you are considering a dell xps laptop, consider the
| dell precision laptop workstation instead which is the business
| version of the consumer level xps.
|
| It also looks like names are being changed, and the business
| laptops are going with a dell pro (essential/premium/plus/max)
| naming convention.
| ishtanbul wrote:
| I have the precision 5690 (the 16inch model) with a ultra 7
| processor and 4k touchscreen (2025 model). It is very heavy,
| but its very powerful. My main gripe is that the battery life
| is very bad, and it has a 165 watt charger, which wont work on
| most planes. So if you fly a lot for work, this laptop will die
| on you unless you bring a lower wattage charger. It also
| doesn't sleep properly. I often find it in my bag hours after
| closing it and the fans are going at full blast. It should have
| a 4th usb port (like the smaller version!). Otherwise I have no
| complaints (other than about windows 11!).
| microflash wrote:
| After using several Precisions at work, I now firmly believe
| that Dell does not know how to cool their workstations
| properly. They are all heavy, pretty bad at energy efficiency
| and run extremely hot (I use my work machine laid belly up in
| summer since fans are always on). I'd take a ThinkPad or Mac
| any day over any Dell.
| hallmason17 wrote:
| Power hungry intel chips and graphics cards are
| inconvenient in laptops when it comes to battery life and
| cooling. It is especially noticeable if you spend any time
| using an M-series macbook pro, where performance is the
| same or better, but you get 16 hours of battery life. I
| prefer to use thinkpads, but apple just has a big
| technological advantage here that stands out in the UX
| department. I really hope advances are made quickly by
| competitors to get similar UX in a more affordable package.
| ragazzina wrote:
| I just want a solid laptop that can be used with the lid
| closed. I want to set it up and never open the lid again. I'll
| guess I'll keep dreaming.
| FfejL wrote:
| > It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore,
| it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that
| the consumer doesn't.
|
| I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.
| notatoad wrote:
| I think they will eventually. It's always been a very
| incoherent sales pitch that your expensive PCs are packed full
| of expensive hardware that's supposed to do AI things, but your
| cheap PCs that have none of that are still capable of doing
| 100% of the AI tasks that customers actually care about:
| accessing chatGPT.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Also, what kind of AI tasks is the average person doing? The
| people thinking about this stuff are detached from reality.
| For most people a computer is a gateway to talking to friends
| and family, sharing pictures, browsing social media, and
| looking up recipes and how-to guides. Maybe they do some
| tracking of things as well in something like Excel or Google
| Sheets.
|
| Consumer AI has never really made any sense. It's going to
| end up in the same category of things as 3D TV's, smart
| appliances, etc.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I don't remember any other time in the tech industry's
| history when "what companies and CEOs want to push" was
| less connected to "what customers want." Nobody transformed
| their business around 3D TVs like current companies are
| transforming themselves to deliver "AI-everything".
| walterbell wrote:
| If memory shortages make existing products non-viable
| (e.g. 50% price increases on mini PCs,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46514794), will
| consumers flock to new/AI products like OpenAI "pen" or
| reject those outright?
| Tanoc wrote:
| I think it does make sense if you're at a certain level
| of user hardware. If you make local computing infeasible
| because of the computational or hardware cost it makes it
| much easier to sell compute as a service. Since about
| 2014 almost every single change to paid software has been
| to make it a recurring fee rather than a single payment,
| and now they can do that with hardware as well. To the
| financially illiterate paying a $15 a month subscription
| to two LLMs from their phone they have a $40 monthly
| payment on for two years seems like a better deal than
| paying $1,200 for a desktop computer with free software
| that they'll use a tenth as much as the phone. This is
| why Nvidia is offering GForce Now the same way in one
| hundred hour increments, as they can get $20 a month that
| goes directly to them, with the chance of getting up to
| an additional $42 maximum if the person buys additional
| extensions of equal amount (another one hundred hours).
| That ends up with $744 a year directly to Nvidia without
| any board partners getting a cut, while a mid grade GPU
| with better performance and no network latency would cost
| that much and last the user five entire years. Most
| people won't realize that long before they reach the end
| of the useful lifetime of the service they'll have paid
| three to four times as much as if they had just bought
| the hardware outright.
|
| With more of the compute being pushed off of local
| hardware they can cheapen out on said hardware with
| smaller batteries, fewer ports and features, and weaker
| CPUs. This lessens the pressure they feel from consumers
| who were taught by corporations in the 20th century that
| improvements will always come year over year. They can
| sell less complex hardware and make up for it with
| software.
|
| For the hardware companies it's all rent seeking from the
| top down. And the push to put "AI" into everything is a
| blitz offensive to make this impossible to escape. They
| just need to normalize non-local computing and have it
| succeed this time, unlike when they tried it with the
| "cloud" craze a few years ago. But the companies didn't
| learn the intended lesson last time when users straight
| up said that they don't like others gatekeeping the
| devices they're holding right in their hands. Instead the
| companies learned they have to deny all other options so
| users are forced to acquiesce to the gatekeeping.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The customers are CEOs dreaming of a human-free work
| force.
| tjr wrote:
| Just off the top of my head of some "consumer" areas that I
| personally encounter...
|
| I don't want AI involved in my laundry machines. The only
| possible exception I could see would be some sort of
| emergency-off system, but I don't think that even needs to
| be "AI". But I don't want AI determining when my laundry is
| adequately washed or dried; I know what I'm doing, and I
| neither need nor want help from AI.
|
| I don't want AI involved in my cooking. Admittedly, I have
| asked ChatGPT for some cooking information (sometimes
| easier than finding it on slop-and-ad-ridden Google), but I
| don't want AI in the oven or in the refrigerator or in the
| stove.
|
| I don't want AI controlling my thermostat. I don't want AI
| controlling my water heater. I don't want AI controlling my
| garage door. I don't want AI balancing my checkbook.
|
| I am totally fine with involving computers and technology
| in these things, but I don't want it to be "AI". I have way
| less trust in nondeterministic neural network systems than
| I do in basic well-tested sensors, microcontrollers, and
| tiny low-level C programs.
| the_snooze wrote:
| A lot of consumer tech needs have been met for decades.
| The problem is that companies aren't able to extract rent
| from all that value.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I do think it makes some sense in limited capacity.
|
| Have some half decent model integrated with OS's builtin
| image editing app so average user can do basic fixing of
| their vacation photos by some prompts
|
| Have some local model with access to files automatically
| tag your photos, maybe even ask some questions and add tags
| based on that and then use that for search ("give me photo
| of that person from last year's vacation"
|
| Similarly with chat records
|
| But once you start throwing it in cloud... people get
| anxious about their data getting lost, or might not exactly
| see the value in subscription
| fragmede wrote:
| You and I live in different bubbles. ChatGPT is the go-to
| for my non-techie friends to ask for advice on basically
| everything. Women asking it for relationship advice and
| medical questions, to guys with business ideas and lawsuit
| stuff.
| chpatrick wrote:
| Consumer local AI? Maybe.
|
| On the other hand everyone non-technical I know under 40
| uses LLMs and my 74 year old dad just started using
| ChatGPT.
|
| You could use a search engine and hope someone answered a
| close enough question (and wade through the SEO slop), or
| just get an AI to actually help you.
| jimbokun wrote:
| "Do my homework assignment for me."
| ericmcer wrote:
| People will want what LLMs can do they just don't want "AI". I
| think having it pervade products in a much more subtle way is
| the future though.
|
| For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment
| half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your
| comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the
| comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert
| would only happen if the comment seemed important but it would
| readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is really
| difficult to do in traditional software but is something an LLM
| could do with low effort. The end result is I only have to deal
| with that annoying popup when I really am glad it is there.
|
| That is a trivial example but you can imagine how a locally run
| LLM that was just part of the SDK/API developers could leverage
| would lead to better UI/UX. For now everyone is making the LLM
| the product, but once we start building products with an LLM as
| a background tool it will be great.
|
| It is actually a really weird time, my whole career we wanted
| to obfuscate implementation and present a clean UI to end
| users, we want them peaking behind the curtain as little as
| possible. Now everything is like "This is built with AI! This
| uses AI!".
| thwarted wrote:
| YouTube could use AI to not recommend videos I've already
| watched, which is apparently a really hard problem.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It just might be that lot of users watch same videos
| multiple times. They must have some data on this and see
| that recommending same videos gets more views than
| recommending new ones.
| i386 wrote:
| I work for YouTube. You're hired.
| tryauuum wrote:
| try disabling collecting the history about the videos
| you've watched in YouTube settings. There are still some
| recommendations after that but they are less cringe
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The problem is the people like me who DO rewatch youtube
| videos. There are a bunch of "Comfort food" videos I turn
| to sometimes. Like you would rewatch a movie you really
| enjoy.
|
| But that's the real problem. You can't just average
| everyone and apply that result to anyone. The "average of
| everyone" fits exactly NO ONE.
|
| The US Navy figured this out long ago in a famous anecdote
| in fact. They wanted to fit a cockpit to the "average"
| pilot, took a shitload of measurements of a lot of airmen,
| and it ended up nobody fit.
|
| The actual solution was customization and accommodations.
| platevoltage wrote:
| My favorite is the new thing where they recommend a
| "members only" video, from a creator that covers current
| events, and the video is 2 years old.
| everdrive wrote:
| Using such an expensive technology to prevent someone from
| making a stupid mistake on a meaningless endeavor seems like
| a complete waste of time. Users should just be allowed to
| fail.
| plasticsoprano wrote:
| Amen! This is part of the overall societal decline of no
| failing for anyone. You gotta feel the pain to get the
| growth.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| Expensive now is super cheap 10 years from now though.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| if somone from 1960 saw the quadrillions of cpu cycles we
| are wasting on absolutely nothing every second, they would
| have an aneurysm
| robrain wrote:
| As someone from 1969, but with an excellent circulatory
| system, I just roll my eyes and look forward to the sound
| of bubbles bursting whilst billionaires weep.
| macintux wrote:
| When bubbles burst, is it really the billionaires who are
| hit the hardest? I'm skeptical.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Tell you what, let's make sure this time it is!
|
| Convince them to sink their fortunes in, and then we just
| make sure it pops.
| mossTechnician wrote:
| > if you close a youtube browser tab with a comment half
| written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose your comment
| if you close this window")`. It does this if the comment is a
| 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert would only
| happen if the comment seemed important but it would readily
| discard short or nonsensical input. That is really difficult
| to do in traditional software but is something an LLM could
| do with low effort.
|
| I don't think that's a great example, because you can
| evaluate the length of the content of a text box with a one-
| line "if" statement. You could even expand it to check for
| how long you've been writing, and cache the contents of the
| box with a couple more lines of code.
|
| An LLM, by contrast, requires a significant amount of disk
| space and processing power for this task, and it would be
| unpredictable and difficult to debug, even if we could define
| a threshold for "important"!
| mort96 wrote:
| I think it's an excellent example to be honest. Most of the
| time whenever someone proposes some use case for a large
| language model that's not just being a chat bot, it's
| either a bad idea, or a decent idea that you'd do much
| better with something much less fancy (like this, where
| you'd obviously prefer some length threshold) than with a
| large language model. It's wild how often I've heard people
| say "we should have an AI do X" when X is something that's
| very obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for
| traditional algorithms.
|
| Sort of like how most of the time when people proposed a
| non-cryptocurrency use for "blockchain", they had either
| re-invented Git or re-invented the database. The similarity
| to how people treat "AI" is uncanny.
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| > It's wild how often I've heard people say "we should
| have an AI do X" when X is something that's very
| obviously either a terrible idea or best suited for
| traditional algorithms.
|
| Likewise when smartphones were new, everyone and their
| mother was certain that random niche thing that made no
| sense as an app would be a perfect app and that if they
| could just get someone to make the app they'd be rich.
| (And of course ideally, the idea haver of the misguided
| idea would get the lions share of the riches, and the
| programmer would get a slice of pizza and perhaps a
| percentage or two of ownership if the idea haver was
| extra generous.)
| fragmede wrote:
| With Claude Code doing the implementing now, we'll have
| to see who gets which slice of pizza!
| reactordev wrote:
| Difference is now, that person with an idea, doesn't need
| a programmer or anyone to share the pizza with. They are
| free to gorge on all 18" of it.
| mandevil wrote:
| The difference between "AI" and "linear regression" is
| whether you are talking to a VC or an engineer.
| ambicapter wrote:
| So, like, machine learning. Remember when people used to call
| it AI/ML? Definitely wasn't as much money being spent on it
| back then.
| slg wrote:
| >For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a
| comment half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose
| your comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the
| comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert
| would only happen if the comment seemed important but it
| would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is
| really difficult to do in traditional software but is
| something an LLM could do with low effort. The end result is
| I only have to deal with that annoying popup when I really am
| glad it is there.
|
| The funny thing is that this exact example could also be used
| by AI skeptics. It's forcing an LLM into a product with
| questionable utility, causing it to cost more to develop, be
| more resource intensive to run, and behave in a manner that
| isn't consistent or reliable. Meanwhile, if there was an
| incentive to tweak that alert based off likelihood of its
| usefulness, there could have always just been a check on the
| length of the text. Suggesting this should be done with an
| LLM as your specific example is evidence that LLMs are
| solutions looking for problems.
| fragmede wrote:
| I've been totally AI-pilled because I don't see why that's
| of questionable utility. How is a regexp going to tell the
| difference between "asdffghjjk" and "So, she cheated on
| me". A mere byte count isn't going to do it either.
|
| If the computer can tell the difference and be less
| annoying, it seems useful to me?
| slg wrote:
| Who said anything about regexp? I was literally talking
| about something as simple as "if(text.length > 100)".
| Also the example provided was distinguishing "a 2 page
| essay or 'asdfasdf'" which clearly can be accomplished
| with length much easier than either an LLM or even
| regexp.
|
| We should keep in mind that we're trying to optimize for
| user's time. "So, she cheated on me" takes less than a
| second to type. It would probably take the user longer to
| respond to whatever pop up warning you give than just
| retyping that text again. So what actual value do you
| think the LLM is contributing here that justifies the
| added complexity and overhead?
|
| Plus that benefit needs to overcome the other undesired
| behavior that an LLM would introduce such as it will now
| present an unnecessary popup if people enter a little
| real data and intentionally navigate away from the page
| (and it should be noted, users will almost certainly be
| much more likely to intentionally navigate away than
| accidentally navigate away). LLMs also aren't
| deterministic. If 90% of the time you navigate away from
| the page with text entered, the LLM warns you, then 10%
| of the time it doesn't, those 10% times are going to be a
| lot more frustrating than if the length check just warned
| you every single time. And from a user satisfaction
| perspective, it seems like a mistake to swap frustration
| caused by user mistakes (accidentally navigating away)
| with frustration caused by your design decisions
| (inconsistent behavior). Even if all those numbers end up
| falling exactly the right way to slightly make the users
| less frustrated overall, you're still trading users who
| were previously frustrated at themselves for users being
| frustrated at you. That seems like a bad business
| decision.
|
| Like I said, this all just seems like a solution in
| search of a problem.
| MichaelRo wrote:
| We went from the bullshit "internet of things" to "LLM of
| things", or as Sheldon from Big Bang Theory put it
| "everything is better with Bluetooth".
|
| Literally "T-shirt with Bluetooth", that's what 99.98% of
| "AI" stickers today advertise.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| What about counting words based on user's current lang,
| and prompting off that?
|
| Close enough for the issue to me and can't be more
| expensive than asking an LLM?
| ori_b wrote:
| Because the computer behaving differently in different
| circumstances is annoying, especially when there's no
| clear cue to the user what the hidden knobs that control
| the circumstances are.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Because in _what world_ do I want the computer making
| value judgements on what I do?
|
| If I want to close the tab of unsubmitted comment text, I
| will. I most certainly don't need a model going "uhmmm
| akshually, I think you might want that later!"
| wavemode wrote:
| > Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed
| important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical
| input.
|
| That doesn't sound ideal at all. And in fact highlights
| what's wrong with AI product development nowadays.
|
| AI as a _tool_ is wildly popular. Almost everyone in the
| world uses ChatGPT or knows someone who does. Here 's the
| thing about tools - you use them in a predictable way and
| they give you a predictable result. I ask a question, I get
| an answer. The thing doesn't randomly interject when I'm
| doing other things and I asked it nothing. I swing a hammer,
| it drives a nail. The hammer doesn't decide that the thing
| it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.
|
| Too many product managers nowadays want AI to not just be a
| tool, they want it to be magic. But magic is distracting, and
| unpredictable, and frequently gets things wrong because it
| doesn't understand the human's intent. That's why people
| mostly find AI integrations confusing and aggravating,
| despite the popularity of AI-as-a-tool.
| bluGill wrote:
| I want magic that works. Sometimes I want a tool to
| interrupt me! I know my route to work so I'm not going to
| ask how I should get there today - but 1% of the time there
| is something wrong with my plan (accident, construction...)
| and I want the tool to say something. I know I need to turn
| right to get someplace, but sometimes as a human I'll say
| left instead: confusing me and the driver where they don't
| turn right, and AI that realizes who made the mistake would
| help.
|
| The hard part is the AI needs to be correct when it doesn't
| something unexpected. I don't know if this is a solvable
| problem, but it is what I want.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Magic in real life never works 100% of the time. It is
| all an illusion were some observers understand the trick
| and others do not. Those that understand it have the
| potential to break the magic. Even the magician has the
| ability to fault the trick.
|
| I want reproducibility not magic.
| bluGill wrote:
| It is magic that I can touch a swith on the wall and
| lights come on. It is magic that I have a warm house
| despite the outside temperature is near freezing. we have
| plenty of other magic that works. I want more
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Electricity, light, and heat aren't magic: they're
| science. Science is something well understood. Something
| that seems magical is something poorly understood. When I
| ask AI a question, I don't know whether it will tell me
| something truthful, mendacious in a verisimilitudinous
| way, or blatantly wrong, and I can only tell when it's
| blatantly wrong. That's magic, and I hate magic. I want
| more science in my life.
| nottorp wrote:
| If your light switch doesn't turn on the lights any more
| it's probably broken.
|
| If your "AI" light switch doesn't turn on the lights, you
| have to rephrase the prompt.
| wredcoll wrote:
| > The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at
| is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.
|
| Sawstop literally patented this and made millions and seems
| to have genuinely improved the world.
|
| I personally am a big fan of tools that make it hard to
| mangle my body parts.
| wavemode wrote:
| sawstop is not AI
| wredcoll wrote:
| Sure, where's the line?
|
| If you want to tell me that llms are inherently non-
| deterministic, then sure, but from the point of view of a
| user, a saw stop activating because the wood is wet is
| really not expected either.
| wavemode wrote:
| Mm yeah, I see the point you're making.
|
| (Though, of course, there certainly are people who
| dislike sawstop for that sort of reason, as well.)
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| also from the point of view from a user: in this example,
| while frustrating/possibly costly, a false positive is
| infinitely preferable to a false negative.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| I mean, I wouldn't want sawstop to hallucinate my finger
| is a piece of wood.
| ericmcer wrote:
| But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once
| distracting and unpredictable. There are a ton of subtle UX
| behaviors a modern computer is doing that you don't notice,
| but if they all disappeared and you had to use windows 95
| for a week you would miss.
|
| That is more what I am advocating for, subtle background UX
| improvements based on an LLMs ability to interpret a users
| intent. We had limited abilities to look at an applications
| state and try to determine a users intent, but it is easier
| to do that with an LLM. Yeah like you point out some users
| don't want you to try and predict their intent, but if you
| can do it accurately a high percentage of the time it is
| "magic".
| mjfisher wrote:
| Serious question: what are those things from windows
| 95/98 I might miss?
|
| Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very
| straightforward and consistent UI that provided great
| feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to
| and including little hints for power users like
| underlining shortcut letters for the & key.
| eterm wrote:
| The only one I can think of, literally the only one, is
| grouped icons.
|
| And even that's only because browsers ended up in a weird
| "windows but tabs but actually tabs are windows" state.
|
| So yeah, I'd miss the UX of dragging tabs into their own
| separate windows.
|
| But even that is something that still feels janky in most
| apps ( windows terminal somehow makes this feel bad, even
| VS code took a long time to make it feel okay ), and I
| wouldn't really miss it that much if there were no tabs
| at all and every tab was forced into a separate window at
| all times with it's own task bar entry.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| It's not like grouped icons wasn't technically infeasible
| on win95. And honestly, whatever they are more useful is
| quite debatable. And personally, I don't even have a task
| panel anymore.
|
| The real stuff not on Win95 that everyone would miss is
| scalable interfaces/high DPI (not necessary as in HiDPI,
| just above 640x480). And this one does require A LOT of
| resources and is still wobbly.
| eterm wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by "Technically feasible", but
| it wasn't supported by explorer.
|
| You could have multiple windows, and you could have MDI
| windows, but you couldn't have shared task bar icons that
| expand on hover to let you choose which one to go to.
|
| If you mean that someone could write a replacement shell
| that did that, then maybe, but at that point it's no
| longer really windows 95.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > But... A lot of stuff you rely on now was probably once
| distracting and unpredictable.
|
| And nobody relied on them when they were distracting and
| unpredictable. People only rely on them now because they
| are not.
|
| LLMs won't ever be predictable. They are designed not to
| be. A predictable AI is something different from a LLM.
| nottorp wrote:
| > There are a ton of subtle UX behaviors a modern
| computer is doing that you don't notice, but if they all
| disappeared and you had to use windows 95 for a week you
| would miss.
|
| Like what? All those popups screaming that my PC is
| unprotected because I turned off windows firewall?
| ori_b wrote:
| I remember seeing one of those "kids use old technology"
| videos, where kids are confused by rotary phones and the
| like.
|
| One of the episodes had them using Windows 98. As I
| recall, the reaction was more or less "this is pretty ok,
| actually". A few WTFs about dialup modems and such, but I
| don't recall complaints about the UI.
| abanana wrote:
| _> subtle UX behaviors_
|
| I'd wager it's more likely to be the opposite.
|
| Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of
| subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there,
| but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to
| throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first. I've
| seen this talked about on HN a fair bit lately.
|
| Using an old-fashioned interface, with 3D buttons to make
| interactive elements clear, and with instant feedback,
| can be a nicer experience than having to work with the
| lack of clarity, and relative laggyness, of some of
| today's interfaces.
| thombles wrote:
| > you can imagine how a locally run LLM that was just part of
| the SDK/API developers could leverage would lead to better
| UI/UX
|
| It's already there for Apple developers:
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels
|
| I saw some presentations about it last year. It's extremely
| easy to use.
| nottorp wrote:
| > The end result is I only have to deal with that annoying
| popup when I really am glad it is there.
|
| Are you sure about that? It will trigger only for what the
| LLM declares important, not what you care about.
|
| Is anyone delivering local LLMs that can actually be trained
| on your data? Or just pre made models for the lowest common
| denominator?
| nkrisc wrote:
| It's because "AI" isn't a feature. "AI" without context is
| meaningless.
|
| Google isn't running ads on TV for Google Docs touting that
| it uses conflict-free replicated data types, or whatever,
| because (almost entirely) no one cares. Most people care the
| same amount about "AI" too.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Honestly some of the recommendations to watch next I get on
| Netflix are pretty good.
|
| No idea if they are AI Netflix doesn't tell and I don't ask.
|
| AI is just a toxic brand at this point IMO.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > For example, if you close a youtube browser tab with a
| comment half written it will pop up an `alert("You will lose
| your comment if you close this window")`. It does this if the
| comment is a 2 page essay or "asdfasdf". Ideally the alert
| would only happen if the comment seemed important but it
| would readily discard short or nonsensical input. That is
| really difficult to do in traditional software but is
| something an LLM could do with low effort.
|
| I agree this would be a great use of LLMs! However, it would
| have to be _really_ low latency, like on the order of
| milliseconds. I don 't think the tech is there yet, although
| maybe it will be soon-ish.
| gt0 wrote:
| Would that be ideal though? Adding enormous complexity to
| solve a trivial problem which would work I'm sure 99.999% of
| the time, but not 100% of the time.
|
| Ideally, in my view, is that the browser asks you if you are
| sure regardless of content.
|
| I use LLMs, but that browser "are you sure" type of
| integration is adding a massive amount of work to do
| something that ultimately isn't useful in any real way.
| publicdebates wrote:
| > readily discard short or nonsensical input
|
| When "asdfasdf" is actually a package name, and it's in reply
| to a request for an NPM package, and the question is
| formulated in a way that makes it hard for LLMs to make that
| connection, you will get a false positive.
|
| I imagine this will happen more than not.
| wrl wrote:
| > Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed
| important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical
| input. That is really difficult to do in traditional software
| but is something an LLM could do with low effort.
|
| I read this post yesterday and this specific example kept
| coming back to me because something about it just didn't sit
| right. And I finally figured it out: Glancing at the alert
| box (or the browser-provided "do you want to navigate away
| from this page" modal) and considering the text that I had
| entered takes... less than 5 seconds.
|
| Sure, 5 seconds here and there adds up over the course of a
| day, but I really feel like this example is grasping at
| straws.
| 9rx wrote:
| The problem isn't so much the five seconds, it is the
| muscle memory. You become accustomed to blindly hitting
| "Yes" every time you've accidentally typed something into
| the text box, and then that time when you actually put a
| lot of effort into something... Boom. Its gone. I have been
| bitten before. Something like the parent described would be
| a _huge_ improvement.
|
| Granted, it seems the even better UX is to save what the
| user inputs and let them recover if they lost something
| important. That would also help for other things, like
| crashes, which have also burned me in the past. But
| tradeoffs, as always.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I have the exact opposite muscle memory.
| officeplant wrote:
| >You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every
| time you've accidentally typed something into the text
| box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of
| effort into something... Boom. Its gone.
|
| I'm not sure we need even local AI's reading everything
| we do for what amounts to a skill issue.
| 9rx wrote:
| You're quite right that those with skills have no need
| for computers, but for the rest of us there is no need
| for them to not have a good user experience.
| addaon wrote:
| > You become accustomed to blindly hitting "Yes" every
| time you've accidentally typed something into the text
| box, and then that time when you actually put a lot of
| effort into something... Boom. Its gone.
|
| Wouldn't you just hit undo? Yeah, it's a bit obnoxious
| that Chrome for example uses cmd-shift-T to undo in this
| case instead of the application-wide undo stack, but I
| feel like the focus for improving software resilience to
| user error should continue to be on increasing the power
| of the undo stack (like it's been for more than 30 years
| so far), not trying to optimize what gets put in the undo
| stack in the first place.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Wouldn 't you just hit undo?_
|
| Because:
|
| 1. Undo is usually treated as an application-level
| concern, meaning that once the application has exited
| there is no specific undo, as it is normally though of,
| function available. The 'desktop environment' integration
| necessary for this isn't commonly found.
|
| 2. Even if the application is still running, it only
| helps if the browser has implemented it. You mention
| Chrome has it, which is good, but Chrome is pretty lousy
| about just about everything else, so... Pick your poison,
| I guess.
|
| 3. This was already mentioned as the better user
| experience anyway, albeit left open-ended for designers,
| so it is not exactly clear what you are trying to add.
| Did you randomly stop reading in the middle?
| th0ma5 wrote:
| I think this is covered in the Bainbridge automation
| paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
| ... When the user doesn't have practiced context like you
| described, to be expected to suddenly have that practiced
| context to do the right thing in a surprise moment is
| untenable.
| fckgw wrote:
| Which is fine! That's me making the explicit choice that
| yes, I want to close this box and yes, I want to lose
| this data. I don't need an AI evaluating how important it
| thinks I am and second guessing my judgement call.
|
| I tell the computer what to do, not the other way around.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| It's also trivially solvable with idk, a length check, or
| any number of other things which don't need to 100b
| parameters to calculate.
| zdragnar wrote:
| This was a problem at my last job. Boss kept suggesting
| shoving AI into features, and I kept pointing out we
| could make the features better with less effort using
| simple heuristics in a few lines of code, and skip adding
| AI altogether.
|
| So much of it nowadays is like the blockchain craze,
| trying to use it as a solution for every problem until it
| sticks.
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Bingo. Nobody uses ChatGPT because it's AI. They use it
| because it does their homework, or it helps them write
| emails, or whatever else. The story can't just be "AI PC." It
| has to be "hey look, it's ChatGPT but you don't have to pay a
| subscription fee."
| ori_b wrote:
| > _Ideally the alert would only happen if the comment seemed
| important but it would readily discard short or nonsensical
| input_
|
| No, ideally I would be able to predict and understand how my
| UI behaves, and train muscle memory.
|
| If closing a tab would mean losing valuable data, the ideal
| UI would allow me to undo it, not try to guess if I cared.
| thisislife2 wrote:
| Yeah. It's the Apple OS model ( _we know what 's right for
| you, this is the right way_) vs the many other customisable
| OSes where it conforms to you.
| bitwize wrote:
| At my current work much of our software stack is based on
| GOFAI techniques. Except no one calls them AI anymore, they
| call it a "rules engine". Rules engines, like LLMs, used to
| be sold standalone and promoted as miracle workers in and of
| themselves. We called them "expert systems" then; this term
| has largely faded from use.
|
| This AI summer is really kind of a replay of the last AI
| summer. In a recent story about expert systems seen here on
| Hackernews, there was even a description of Gary Kildall from
| _The Computer Chronicles_ expressing skepticism about AI that
| parallels modern-day AI skepticism. LLMs and CNNs will, as
| you describe, settle into certain applications where they 'll
| be profoundly useful, become embedded in other software as
| techniques rather than an application in and of themselves...
| and then we won't call them AI. Winter is coming.
| tliltocatl wrote:
| No. No-no-no-no-no. I want predictability. I don't want a
| black box with no tuning handles and no awareness of the
| context to randomly change the behavior of my environment.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| I've seen some thoroughly unhinged suggestions floating
| around the web for a UI/UX that is wholly generated and
| continuously adjusted by an LLM and I struggle to imagine a
| more nightmarish computing experience.
| themafia wrote:
| I want a functioning search engine. Keep your goofy
| opinionated mostly wrong LLM out of my way, please.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| There is place for it but it is insanely overrated. AI
| overlords are trying to sell incremental (if in places pretty
| big) improvement in tools as revolution.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| Dell are less beholden to shareholder pressure than others,
| Michael Dell owns 50% of the company since it went public
| again.
| nikanj wrote:
| Companies don't really exist to make products for consumers,
| they live to create stock value for investors. And the stock
| market loves AI
| bluGill wrote:
| The stock market as always been about whatever is the fad in
| the short term, and whatever produces value in the long term.
| Today AI is the fad, but investors who care about
| fundamentals have always cared about pleasing customers
| because that is where the real value has always come from.
| (though be careful - not all customers are worth having, some
| wannabe customers should not be pleased)
| ehnto wrote:
| As someone pointed out, Dell is 50% owned by Michael Dell. So
| it's less influenced by this paradigm.
| pmdr wrote:
| Meanwhile we got Copilot in Notepad.
| ivanjermakov wrote:
| Treating consumers as customers, good.
| tpurves wrote:
| Dell is cooked this year for reasons entirely outside their
| control. DRAM and storage/drive shortages are causing costs of
| those to go to the moon. And Dell's 'inventory' light supply
| chain and narrow margins puts them in a perfect storm of trouble.
| dude250711 wrote:
| Anything but admitting that AI king is naked, here on HN...
| cogman10 wrote:
| What? No, this is a pretty relevant comment that is being
| directly caused by AI.
|
| Consumer PCs and hardware are going to be expensive in 2026
| and AI is primarily to blame. You can find examples of CEOs
| talking about buying up hardware for AI without having a
| datacenter to run it in. This run on hardware will ultimately
| drive hardware prices up everywhere.
|
| The knock on effect is that hardware manufacturers are likely
| going to spend less money doing R&D for consumer level
| hardware. Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the
| same research dollars making a 700 core beast for AI
| workloads in a datacenter? And you can get a nice premium for
| that product because every AI company is fighting to get any
| hardware right now.
| bluGill wrote:
| > Why make a CPU for a laptop when you can spend the same
| research dollars
|
| You might be right, but I suspect not. While the hardware
| company are willing to do without laptop sales, data
| centers need the power efficiency as well.
|
| Facebook has (well had - this was ~10 years ago when I
| heard it) a team of engineers making their core code faster
| because in some places a 0.1% speed improvement across all
| their servers results in saving hundreds of thousands of
| dollars per month (sources won't give real numbers but
| reading between the lines this seems about right) on the
| power bill. Hardware that can do more with less power thus
| pays for itself very fast in the data center.
|
| Also cooling chips internally is often a limit of speed, so
| if you can make your chip just a little more efficient it
| can do more. Many CPUs will disable parts of the CPU not in
| use just to save that heat, if you can use more of the CPU
| that translates to more work done and in turn makes you
| better than the competition.
|
| Of course the work must be done, so data centers will
| sometimes have to settle for whatever they can get. Still
| they are always looking for faster chips that use less
| power because that will show up on the bottom line very
| fast.
| flyinghamster wrote:
| See also, Crucial exiting the marketplace. That one hit me
| out of left field, since they've been my go-to for RAM for
| decades. Though I also see that as a little bit of what has
| been the story of American businesses: "It's too much
| trouble to make consumer products. Let's just make
| components or sell raw materials, or be middlemen instead.
| No one will notice."
| soupfordummies wrote:
| So it was RAM a couple months ago and now storage/drives are
| going to the moon also?
| stonogo wrote:
| It was RAM a couple months ago, and it continues to be RAM.
| Major RAM manufacturers like SK Hynix are dismantling NAND
| production to increase RAM manufacturing, which is leading to
| sharp price increases for solid-state storage.
| yalogin wrote:
| They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about
| functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not.
| It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why
| even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are
| doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them
| did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They
| will slowly get there but they have time. The current froth is
| all about AI infrastructure not consumer devices.
| bluGill wrote:
| Even customers who care about AI (or perhaps should...) have
| other concerns. With the RAM shortage coming up many customers
| may choose to do without AI features to save money even though
| they want it at a lower price.
| jorvi wrote:
| The only thing Apple is behind on in the AI race is LLMs.
|
| They've been vastly ahead of everyone else with things like
| text OCR, image element recognition / extraction, microphone
| noise suppression, etc.
|
| iPhones have had these features 2-5 years before Android did.
| fragmede wrote:
| Kind of a big "only" though. Siri is still shit and it's been
| 15 years since initial release.
| 0x38B wrote:
| When I'm driving and tell Siri, "Call <family member
| name>", sometimes instead of calling, it says, "To who?",
| and I can't get it to call no matter what I do.
| asdff wrote:
| Amazing how its been 15 years and it still can't discern 15
| from 50 when you talk to it.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| TTS is absolutely horrible on iOS. I have nearly driven into
| a wall when trying to use it whilst driving and it goofs up
| what I've said terribly. For the love of all things holy,
| will someone at Apple finally fix text to speech? It feels
| like they last touched it in 2016. My phone can run offline
| LLMs and generate images but it can't understand my words.
| galleywest200 wrote:
| > I have nearly driven into a wall when trying to use it
| whilst driving and it goofs up what I've said terribly.
|
| People should not be using their phones while driving
| anyways. My iPhone disables all notifications, except for
| Find My notifications, while driving. Bluetooth speaker
| calls are an exception.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| It sounds like you mean STT not TTS there?
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| You're right, in my rage I typod, its really frustrating,
| even friends will text me and their text makes no sense,
| and 2 minutes later "STUPID VOICE TO TEXT" I have a few
| friends who drive trucks, so they need to be able to use
| their voice to communicate.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| I have to say that OpenAI's Whisper model is excellent.
| If you could leverage that somehow I think it would
| really improve. I run it locally myself on an old PC with
| 3060 card. This way I can run whisper large which is
| still speedy on a GPU especially with faster-whisper.
| Added bonus is the language autodetection which is great
| because I speak 3 languages regularly.
|
| I think there's even better models now but Whisper still
| works fine for me. And there's a big ecosystem around it.
| delecti wrote:
| Better speech transcription is cool, but that feels kinda
| contrived. Phone calls exist, so do voice messages sent
| via texting apps, and professional drivers can also just
| wait a bit to send messages if they really must be text;
| they're on the job, but if it's really that urgent they
| can pull over.
| jimbokun wrote:
| They can also use paper maps instead of GPS.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| Apple's AI powered image editor (like removing something from
| the background) is near unusable. Samsung's is near magic,
| Google's seems great. So there's a big gap here.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Well if I ever used an slop-image-generator, that'd be an
| issue, but as I don't, it's a bit of a non-event!
| nerdjon wrote:
| All of the reporting about Apple being behind on AI is driving
| me insane and I hope that what Dell is doing is finally going
| to be the reversal of this pattern.
|
| The only thing that Apple is really behind on is shoving the
| word (word?) "AI" in your face at every moment when ML has been
| silently running in many parts of their platforms well before
| ChatGPT.
|
| Sure we can argue about Siri all day long and some of that is
| warranted but even the more advanced voice assistants are still
| largely used for the basics.
|
| I am just hoping that this bubble pops or the marketing turns
| around before Apple feels "forced" to do a copilot or recall
| like disaster.
|
| LLM tech isn't going away and it shouldn't, it has its valid
| use cases. But we will be much better when it finally goes back
| into the background like ML always was.
| yalogin wrote:
| Right! Also I don't think Siri is that important to the
| overall user experience on the ecosystem. Sure it's one of
| the most visible use cases but how many people really care
| about that? I don't want to talk out loud to do tasks
| usually, it's helpful in some specific scenarios but not the
| primary use case. The text counterpart of understanding user
| context on the phone is more important even in the context of
| llms, and that what plays into the success of their stack
| going forward
| lurking_swe wrote:
| are you really asking why someone would like a much better
| siri?
|
| - truck drivers that are driving for hours.
|
| - commuters driving to work
|
| - ANYONE with a homepod at home that likes to do things
| hands free (cooking, dishes, etc).
|
| - ANYONE with airpods in their ears that is not in an
| awkward social setting (bicycle, walking alone on the
| sidewalk, on a trail, etc)
|
| every one of these interaction modes benefits from a smart
| siri.
|
| That's just the tip of the iceberg. Why can't I have a siri
| that can intelligently do multi step actions for me? "siri
| please add milk and eggs to my Target order. Also let my
| wife know that i'll pick up the order on my way home from
| work. Lastly, we're hosting some friends for dinner this
| weekend. I'm thinking Italian. Can you suggest 5 recipes i
| might like? [siri sends me the recipes ASYNC after a web
| search]"
|
| All of this is TECHNICALLY possible. There's no reason
| apple couldn't build out, or work with, various retailers
| to create useful MCP-like integrations into siri. Just omit
| dangerous or destructive actions and require the user to
| manually confirm or perform those actions. Having an LLM
| add/remove items in my cart is not dangerous. Importantly,
| siri should be able to do some tasks for me in the
| background. Like on my mac...i'm able to launch Cursor and
| have it work in agent mode to implement some small feature
| in my project, while i do something else on my computer.
| Why must i stare at my phone while siri "thinks" and
| replies with something stupid lol. Similarly, why can't my
| phone draft a reply to an email ASYNC and let me review it
| later at my leisure? Everything about siri is so
| synchronous. It sucks.
|
| It's just soooo sooo bad when you consider how good it
| could be. I think we're just conditioned to expect it to
| suck. It doesn't need to.
| nerdjon wrote:
| I doubt that anyone is actually suggesting that Siri
| should not be better, but to me I think the issues with
| it are very much overblown when it does what I actually
| ask it to do the vast majority of the time since the
| reality is most of the time what I actually want to ask
| it to do are basic things.
|
| I have a several homepods, and it does what I ask it to
| do. This includes being the hub of all of my home
| automation.
|
| Yes there are areas it can improve but I think the
| important question is how much use would those things
| actually get vs making a cool announcement, a fun party
| trick, and then never used again.
|
| We have also seen the failures that have been done by
| trying to treat LLM as a magic box that can just do
| things for you so while these things are "Technically"
| possible they are far from being reliable.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > siri please add milk and eggs to my Target order.
|
| Woah woah woah, surely you're not suggesting that you, a
| user, should have some agency over how you interact with
| a store?
|
| No, no, you're not getting off that easy. They'll want
| you to use Terry, the Target-AI, through the target app.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I've never used Siri. Never even tried it. It's disabled on
| my phone as much as I've been able to work out how to do.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| We have a home pod, we use it a lot for simple things
| like timers when cooking or playing a particular kind of
| music. They are simple and dumb, but they have become
| part of our lives. It's just a hands free way to doing
| simple things we might do on the phone.
|
| We are looking forward to being able to ask Siri to pipe
| some speech through to an AI
| tecoholic wrote:
| Nailed it? Maybe close. They still have a keyboard button
| dedicated to Copoilot. That thing can't be reconfigured easily.
| xgkickt wrote:
| Can PowerToys remap it?
| projektfu wrote:
| I have one laptop with a Copilot key in my business. (I
| didn't even realize that when I bought it.) It takes the
| place of a modifier key, I think the menu key. Except it
| outputs a specific keypress (Ctrl+Shift+F23). So it can't
| be mapped to anything useful like a modifier key. But you
| can reassign the meaning of Ctrl+Shift+F23.
| scblock wrote:
| You can sort of remap it on windows, but it's somewhat
| limited in my experience. It shows up as a keyboard chord
| rather than a simple button press. I think it's
| LWin+LShift+F23. I ended up simply disabling it entirely on
| my gaming laptop. I've been meaning to see if it's easier
| to make it useful on KDE Plasma desktop but haven't yet
| (though I did remap the HP Omen button to pull down Yakuake
| instead).
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| Required for Windows certification nowadays iirc
| beloch wrote:
| "We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a
| device--in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it
| --but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially
| from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI,"
| Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses
| them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."
|
| --------------
|
| What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing
| buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term
| that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time
| thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative
| connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you
| write a cover letter.
|
| If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care
| if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a
| microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will
| do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just
| another algorithm under the hood and out of mind.
|
| What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for
| people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets
| them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > People don't care if a computer has a NPU
|
| I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU
| and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think
| that machine is overpriced for my needs.
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Alas NPUs are in essentially all modern CPUs by Intel and
| AMD. It's not a separate bit of silicon, it's on the same
| package as the CPU
| JohnFen wrote:
| True. But if a company is specifically calling out that
| their machine has an NPU, I assume they're also adding an
| surcharge for it above what they would charge if they
| didn't mention it. I'm not claiming that this is a rational
| stance, only that I take "NPU" as a signal for
| "overpriced".
| Tsiklon wrote:
| Ahh I hear you that's a fair observation.
| pier25 wrote:
| Consumers are not idiots. We know all this AI PC crap is it's
| mostly a useless gimmick.
|
| One day it will be very cool to run something like ChatGPT,
| Claude, or Gemini locally in our phones but we're still very,
| very far away from that.
| MBCook wrote:
| It's today's 3D TVs. It's something investors got all hyped up
| about that everybody "has to have".
|
| There is useful functionality there. Apple has had it for
| years, so have others. But at the time they weren't calling it
| "AI" because that wasn't the cool word.
|
| I also think most people associate AI with ChatGPT or other
| conversational things. And I'm not entirely sure I want that on
| my computer.
|
| But some of the things Apple and others have done that aren't
| conversational are very useful. Pervasive OCR on Windows and
| Mac is fantastic, for example. You could brand that as AI. But
| you don't really need to no one cares if you do or not.
| pier25 wrote:
| > _Pervasive OCR on Windows and Mac is fantastic, for
| example._
|
| I agree. Definitely useful features but still a far cry from
| LLMs which is what the average consumer identifies as AI.
| cco wrote:
| Not that far away, you can run a useful model on flagship
| phones today, something around GPT 3.5's level.
|
| So we're probably only a few years out from today's SOTA models
| on our phones.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| They've just realised that AI won't be in the PC, but on a
| server. Where Dell are heavily selling into - "AI datacenter"
| counted for about 40% of there infrastructure revenue
| kingstnap wrote:
| NPUs are just kind of weird and difficult to develop for and
| integration is usually done poorly.
|
| Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers
| and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't
| currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.
| criddell wrote:
| A while ago I tried to figure out which APIs use the NPU and it
| was confusing to say the least.
|
| They have something called the Windows Copilot Runtime but that
| seems to be a blanket label and from their announcement I
| couldn't really figure out how the NPU ties into it. It seems
| like the NPU is used if it's there but isn't necessary for most
| things.
| scblock wrote:
| This should have been obvious to anyone paying any attention
| whatsoever, long before any one of these computers launched as a
| product. But we can't make decisions on product or marketing
| based on reality or market fit. No, we have to make decisions on
| the investor buzzword faith market.
|
| Hence the large percentage of Youtube ads I saw being "with a
| Dell AI PC, powered by Intel..." here are some lies.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| There is one feature that I do care about.
|
| Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more
| private than server based options.
| delaminator wrote:
| Whisper works great, even the medium model is pretty good.
|
| But I use the 3Gb all day every day.
|
| I built a personal voice agent
|
| https://github.com/lawless-m/TheHand
| Traster wrote:
| Fundamentally when you think about it, what people know today as
| AI are things like ChatGPT and _all_ of those products run on
| cloud infrastructure mainly via the browser or an app. So it
| makes perfect sense that customers just get confused when you say
| "This is an AI PC". Like, what a weird thing to say - my
| smartphone can do ChatGPT why would I buy a PC to do that. It's
| just a totally confusing selling point. So you ask the question
| why is it an AI PC and then you have to talk about NPUs, which
| apart from anything else are confusing (Neural what?) but bring
| you back to this conversation:
|
| What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh
| ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the
| cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?
| xnx wrote:
| > It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore,
| it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that
| the consumer doesn't.
|
| This seems like a cop out for saving cost by putting Intel GPUs
| in laptops instead of Nvidia.
| recursive wrote:
| How is saving costs a cop out? That's a genuine goal of most
| businesses.
| rchaud wrote:
| Discrete GPU + laptop means 2 hours of battery life. The
| average customer isn't buying those.
| tedmcory77 wrote:
| People dont want feature x (AI). They want problem(s) solved.
| mjbale116 wrote:
| On the same note, whats going on with Dell's marketing lately?
|
| Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Premium, Dell _Pro_ Premium Dell Max, Dell
| _Pro_ max... They went and added capacitive keys on the XPS? Why
| would you do this...
|
| A lot of decisions that do not make sense to me.
| rationalist wrote:
| It's a lot easier for people to spend more money when they are
| confused about their choices.
| Tajnymag wrote:
| I thought they actually dumbed down the model names. Basically
| the more adjactives the laptop has, the higher the model is.
| Now the machines can have pronounciable names and just add
| generation number every year or so.
|
| Sure, the original numbering system did make sense, but you had
| to Google what the system meant. Now, it's kind of intuitive,
| even though the it's just a different permutation of the same
| words?
| almosthere wrote:
| The typical consumer doesn't care about any checkbox feature.
| They just care if they can play the games they care about and
| word/email/netflix.
|
| That being said, netflix would be an impossible app without gfx
| acceleration APIs that are enabled by specific CPU and/or GPU
| instruction sets. The typical consumer doesn't care about those
| CPU/GPU instruction sets. At least they don't care to know about
| them. However they would care if they didn't exist and Netflix
| took 1 second per frame to render.
|
| Similar to AI - they don't care about AI until some killer app
| that they DO care about needs local AI.
|
| There is no such killer app. But they're coming. However as we
| turn the corner into 2026 it's becoming extremely clear that
| local AI is never going to be enough for the coming wave of AI
| requirements. AI is going to require 10-15 simultaneous LLM calls
| or GenAI requests. These are things that won't do well on local
| AI ever.
| rasz wrote:
| Even i3 cpu is perfectly fine software decoding 2160p H264, the
| only consequence is about 2x higher power draw compared to
| NVidia decoder.
| metalman wrote:
| I already have experience with intermitent wipers, they are
| impossible to use reliably, a newer car I have made the
| intermitent wipers fully automatic, and impossible to
| dissable.Now they have figured out how to make intermitent wipers
| talk, and want to put them in everything. I forsee a future where
| humanity has total power and fine controll over reality, where
| finaly after hundreds of years, there is weather controll good
| enough to make it rain exactly the right amount for intermitent
| wipers to work properly, but we are not there yet.
| 4d4m wrote:
| Happy Dell takes user feedback to heart
| disfictional wrote:
| As someone who spent a year writing an SDK specifically for AI
| PCs, it always felt like a solution in search of a problem. Like
| watching dancers in bunny suits sell CPUs, if the consumer
| doesn't know the pain point you're fixing, they won't buy your
| product.
| martinald wrote:
| Tbh it's been the same in Windows PCs since forever. Like MMX
| in the Pentium 1 days - was marketed as basically essential for
| anything "multimedia" but provided somewhat between no and
| minimal speedup (v little software was compiled for it).
|
| It's quite similar with Apple's neural engine, which afiak is
| used very little for LLMs, even for coreML. I know I don't
| think I ever saw it being used in asitop. And I'm sure whatever
| was using it (facial recognition?) could have easily ran on GPU
| with no real efficiency loss.
| Maxatar wrote:
| I have to disagree with you about MMX. It's possible a lot of
| software didn't target it explicitly but on Windows MMX was
| very widely used as it was integrated into DirectX, ffmpeg,
| GDI, the initial MP3 libraries (l3codeca which was used by
| Winamp and other popular MP3 players) and the popular DIVX
| video codec.
| bombcar wrote:
| MMX had a chicken/egg problem; it did take awhile to "take
| off" so early adopters really didn't see much from it, but
| by the time it was commonplace it was doing some work.
| martinald wrote:
| ffmpeg didn't come out for 4 years after the MMX brand was
| introduced!
|
| Of course MMX was widely used later but at the time it was
| complete marketing.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The silicon is sitting idle in the case of most laptop NPUs.
| In my experience, embedded NPUs are very efficient, so
| there's theoretically real gains to be made if the cores were
| actually used.
| martinald wrote:
| Yes but you could use the space on die for GPU cores.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Apple's neural engine is used a lot by the non-LLM ML tasks
| all over the system like facial recognition in photos and the
| like. The point of it isn't to be some beefy AI co-processor
| but to be a low-power accelerator for background ML
| workloads.
|
| The same workloads _could_ use the GPU but it 's more general
| purpose and thus uses more power for the same task. The same
| reason macOS uses hardware acceleration for video codecs and
| even JPEG, the work could be done on the CPU but cost more in
| terms of power. Using hardware acceleration helps with the
| 10+ hour lifetime on the battery.
| martinald wrote:
| Yes of course but it's basically a waste of silicon (which
| is very valuable) imo - you save a handful of watts to do
| very few tasks. I would be surprised if in the length of my
| MacBook the NPU has been utilised more than 1% of the time
| the system is being used.
|
| You still need a GPU regardless if you can do JPEG and h264
| decode on the card - for games, animations, etc etc.
| buildbot wrote:
| Using VisionOCR stuff on MacOS spins my M4 ANE up from 0 to
| 1W according to poweranalyzer
| convivialdingo wrote:
| I spent a few months working on different edge compute NPUs
| (ARM mostly) with CNN models and it was really painful. A lot
| of impressive hardware, but I was always running into software
| fallbacks for models, custom half-baked NN formats, random
| caveats, and bad quantization.
|
| In the end it was faster, cheaper, and more reliable to buy a
| fat server running our models and pay the bandwidth tax.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| I don't know how many others here have a CoPilot+ PC but the NPU
| on it is basically useless. There isn't any meaningful feature I
| get by having that NPU. They are far too limited to ever do any
| meaningful local LLM inference, image processing or generation.
| It handles stuff like video chat background blurring, but users'
| PC's have been doing that for years now without an NPU.
| kenjackson wrote:
| I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of what these local NPUs
| can really do. I've had friends ask me about this (as the
| resident computer expert) and I really have no idea. Everything
| I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text, etc...) are all
| things that I never felt like my non-NPU machine struggled
| with. Is there a single remotely killer application for local
| client NPUs?
| martinald wrote:
| The problem is essentially memory bandiwdth afiak.
| Simplifying a lot in my reply, but most NPUs (all?) do not
| have faster memory bandwidth than the GPU. They were
| originally designed when ML models were megabytes not
| gigabytes. They have a small amount of very fast SRAM (4MB I
| want to say?). LLM models _do not_ fit into 4MB of SRAM :).
|
| And LLM inference is heavily memory bandwidth bound (reading
| input tokens isn't though - so it _could_ be useful for this
| in theory, but usually on device prompts are very short).
|
| So if you are memory bandwidth bound anyway and the NPU
| doesn't provide any speedup on that front, it's going to be
| no faster. But has loads of other gotchas so no real "SDK"
| format for them.
|
| Note the idea isn't bad per se, it has real efficiencies when
| you do start getting compute bound (eg doing multiple
| parallel batches of inference at once), this is basically
| what TPUs do (but with far higher memory bandwidth).
| zozbot234 wrote:
| NPUs are still useful for LLM pre-processing and other
| compute-bound tasks. They will waste memory bandwidth
| during LLM generation phase (even in the best-case scenario
| where they aren't physically bottlenecked on bandwidth to
| begin with, compared to the iGPU) since they generally have
| to read padded/dequantized data from main memory as they
| compute directly on that, as opposed to being able to
| unpack it in local registers like iGPUs can.
|
| > usually on device prompts are very short
|
| Sure, but that might change with better NPU support, making
| time-to-first-token quicker with larger prompts.
| observationist wrote:
| The idea that tokenization is what they're for is absurd
| - you're talking a tenth of a thousandth of a millionth
| of a percent of efficiency gain in real world usage, if
| that, and only if someone bothers to implement it in
| software that actually gets used.
|
| NPUs are racing stripes, nothing more. No killer features
| or utility, they probably just had stock and a good deal
| they could market and tap into the AI wave with.
| microtonal wrote:
| I think they were talking about prefill, which is
| typically compute-bound.
| martinald wrote:
| Yes I said that in my comment. Yes they might be useful
| for that - but when you start getting to prompts that are
| long enough to have any significant compute time you are
| going to need far more RAM than these devices have.
|
| Obviously in the future this might change. But as we
| stand now dedicated silicon for _just_ LLM prefill
| doesn't make a lot of sense imo.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You don't need much on-device RAM for compute-bound
| tasks, though. You just shuffle the data in and out,
| trading a bit of latency for an overall gain on power
| efficiency which will help whenever your computation is
| ultimately limited by power and/or thermals.
| Someone wrote:
| > Everything I see advertised for (blurring, speech to text,
| etc...) are all things that I never felt like my non-NPU
| machine struggled with.
|
| I don't know how good these neural engines are, but
| transistors are dead-cheap nowadays. That makes adding
| specialized hardware a valuable option, even if it doesn't
| speed up things but 'only' decreases latency or power usage.
| bitwize wrote:
| "WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?"
|
| "You multiply matrices of INT8s."
|
| "OH... MY... GOD"
|
| NPUs really just accelerate low-precision matmuls. A lot of
| them are based on systolic arrays, which are like a
| configurable pipeline through which data is "pumped" rather
| than a general purpose CPU or GPU with random memory access.
| So they're a bit like the "synergistic" processors in the
| Cell, in the respect that they accelerate some operations
| really quickly, provided you feed them the right way with the
| CPU and even then they don't have the oomph that a good GPU
| will get you.
| fragmede wrote:
| Do compilers know how to take advantage of that, or do
| programs need code that specifically takes advantage of
| that?
| indubioprorubik wrote:
| YaWelco
|
| metothe
|
| clubpal
| rcxdude wrote:
| I think a lot of it is just power savings on those features,
| since the dedicated silicon can be a lot more energy
| efficient even if it's not much more powerful.
| sosodev wrote:
| In theory NPUs are a cheap, efficient alternative to the GPU
| for getting good speeds out of larger neural nets. In
| practice they're rarely used because for simple tasks like
| blurring, speech to text, noise cancellation, etc you can get
| usually do it on the CPU just fine. For power users doing
| really hefty stuff they usually have a GPU anyway so that
| gets used because it's typically much faster. That's exactly
| what happens with my AMD AI Max 395+ board. I thought maybe
| the GPU and NPU could work in parallel but memory limitations
| mean that's often slower than just using the GPU alone. I
| think I read that their intended use case for the NPU is
| background tasks when the GPU is already loaded but that
| seems like a very niche use case.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| If the NPU happens to use less power for any given amount
| of TOPS it's still a win since compute-heavy workloads are
| ultimately limited by power and thermals most often,
| especially on mobile hardware. That frees up headroom for
| the iGPU. You're right about memory limitations, but these
| are generally relevant for e.g. token generation not
| prefill.
| skrebbel wrote:
| I have one as well and I simply don't get it. I lucked into
| being able to do somewhat acceptable local LLM'ing by virtue of
| the Intel integrated "GPU" sharing VRAM and RAM, which I'm
| pretty sure wasn't meant to be the awesome feature it turned
| out to be. Sure, it's dead slow, but I can run mid size models
| and that's pretty cool for an office-marketed HP convertible.
|
| (it's still amazing to me that I can download a 15GB blob of
| bytes and then that blob of bytes can be made to answer
| questions and write prose)
|
| But the NPU, the thing actually _marketed_ for doing local AI
| just sits there doing nothing.
| GrantMoyer wrote:
| The idea is that NPUs are more power efficient for
| convolutional neural network operations. I don't know whether
| they actually _are_ more power efficent, but it 'd be wrong to
| dismiss them just because they don't unlock new capabilties or
| perform well for very large models. For smaller ML applications
| like blurring backgrounds, object detection, or OCR, they could
| be beneficial for battery life.
| margalabargala wrote:
| Not sure about all NPUs, but TPUs like Google's Coral
| accelerator are absolutely, massively more efficient per watt
| than a GPU, at least for things like image processing.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Yes, the idea before the whole shove LLMs into everything era
| was that small, dedicated models for different tasks would be
| integrated into both the OS and applications.
|
| If you're using a recent phone with a camera, it's likely
| using ML models that may or may not be using AI
| accelerators/NPUs on the device itself. The small models are
| there, though.
|
| Same thing with translation, subtitles, etc. All small local
| models doing specialized tasks well.
| fragmede wrote:
| OCR on smartphones is a clear winner in this area. Stepping
| back, it's just mind blowing how easy it is to take a
| picture of text and then select it and copy and paste it
| into whatever. And I totally just take it for granted.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| NPUs overall need better support from local AI frameworks.
| They're not "useless" for what they can do (low-precision bulk
| compute, which is potentially relevant for many of the newer
| models) and they could help address thermal limits due to their
| higher power efficiency compared to CPU/iGPU. but that all
| requires specialized support that hasn't been coming.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| The stacks for consumer NPUs are absolutely cursed, this does
| not surprise me.
|
| They (Dell) promised a lot in their marketing, but we're like
| several years into the whole Copilot PC thing and you still can
| barely, if at all, use sane stacks with laptop NPUs.
| janalsncm wrote:
| If I had to steelman Dell, they probably made a bet a while ago
| that the software side would have something for the NPU, and if
| so they wanted to have a device to cash in on it. The
| turnaround time for new hardware was probably on the order of
| years (I could be wrong about this).
|
| It turned out to be an incorrect gamble but maybe it wasn't a
| crazy one to make at the time.
|
| There is also a chicken and egg problem of software being
| dependent on hardware, and hardware only being useful if there
| is software to take advantage of its features.
|
| That said I haven't used Windows in 10 years so I don't have a
| horse in this race.
| hacker_homie wrote:
| Yeah, that's because the original npus were a rush job, the amd
| AI Max is the only one that's worth anything in my opinion.
| mrinterweb wrote:
| The Apple M series chips are solid for inference.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought everyone was still
| doing inference on the GPU for Apple silicon.
| krooj wrote:
| Question - from the perspective of the actual silicon, are
| these NPUs just another form of SIMD? If so, that's laughable
| sleight of hand and the circuits will be relegated to some
| mothball footnote in the same manner as AVX512, etc.
|
| To be fair, SIMD made a massive difference for early multimedia
| PCs for things like music playback, gaming, and composited UIs.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| NPUs are a separate accelerator block, not in-CPU SIMD. The
| latter exists for matrix compute, but only in the latest
| version of AVX which has yet to reach consumer CPUs.
| greenchair wrote:
| I've got one anecdote: friend needed Live Captions for a
| translating job and had to get copilot+ PC just for that.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| WTF is an "AI PC"? Most of "AI" happens on the internet, in big
| datacenters, your PC has nothing to do with that. It will more
| likely confuse users who don't understand why they need a special
| PC when any PC can access chatgpt.com.
|
| Now, for some who actually want to do AI locally, they are not
| going to look for "AI PCs". They are going to look for specific
| hardware, lots of RAM, big GPUs, etc... And it is not a very
| common use case anyways.
|
| I have an "AI laptop", and even I, who run a local model from
| time to time and bought that PC with my own money don't know what
| it means, probably some matrix multiplication hardware that I
| have not idea how to take advantage of. It was a good deal for
| the specs it had, that's the only thing I cared for, the "AI"
| part was just noise.
|
| At least a "gaming PC" means something. I expect high power, a
| good GPU, a CPU with good single-core performance, usually 16 to
| 32 GB of RAM, high refresh rate monitor, RGB lighting. But "AI
| PC", no idea.
| zokier wrote:
| AI PC in MS parlance is a computer with 40+ TOPS NPU built-in.
| Yes, they are intended for local AI applications.
| Galanwe wrote:
| I have a "Copilot" button on my new ThinkPad. I have yet to
| understand what it does that necessitates a dedicated button.
|
| On Linux it does nothing, on Windows it tells me I need an Office
| 365 plan to use it.
|
| Like... What the hell... They literally placed a paywalled
| Windows only physical button on my laptop.
|
| What next, an always-on screen for ads next to the trackpad?
| rzzzt wrote:
| It's equivalent to Win + Shift + F23 so you can map it to some
| useful action if you have a suitable utility at hand.
| hacker_homie wrote:
| I used https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd with ``` [ids] * [main]
| f23 = oneshot(control) [control] toggle(control) ``` To turn it
| back into a ctrl key
| d--b wrote:
| People don't want AI PC, cause they don't want to spend 5000
| bucks for something that's half as good as the free version of
| ChatGPT.
|
| But we've been there before. Computers are going to get faster
| for cheaper, and LLMs are going to be more optimized, cause right
| now, they do a ton of useless calculations for sure.
|
| There's a market, just not right now.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Isn't the only AI PC a Mac Studio?
| fhd2 wrote:
| According to ancient Apple ads, a "Mac" is not a "PC".
| mghackerlady wrote:
| Macs fundamentally can't be personal computers since they're
| entirely controlled by apple. Any computer running nonfree
| software can't be a personal one
| kube-system wrote:
| lol so the IBM PC isn't a PC?
| rsynnott wrote:
| Well, yes, Dell, everyone knows that, but it is _most_ improper
| to actually _say_ it. What would the basilisk think?!
| tantalor wrote:
| Yes, everybody should buy an AI PC. Buy two! For all we know,
| that's exactly what we need for AGI... why would you be against
| that?
| tliltocatl wrote:
| Why would the basilisk care about people spending money on what
| is clearly a dead end?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| It seems many products (PCs, TVs, cars, kitchen appliances, etc.)
| have transitioned from "solve for the customer" to "solve for
| ourselves (product manufacturers) and tell the customer it's for
| them, even though it's 99% value to us and 1% value to them".
| znpy wrote:
| I saw the latest xps laptops and I'm really intrigued... finally
| a high end laptop without an nvidia gpu!
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| We do care. We REALLY don't want AI on by default on our PCs.
| yndoendo wrote:
| They still ship their laptops with the Copilot key. Once that is
| removed then their statement will follow their actions.
| pmontra wrote:
| I'd be surprised if Microsoft would sell them Windows licenses
| or would work with them on drivers if they don't put the
| Copilot key on the keyboard.
| bombcar wrote:
| What is with Microsoft and demanding a key for every new
| thing they come up with?
| mrinterweb wrote:
| Most consumers aren't running LLMs locally. Most people's on-
| device AI is likely whatever Windows 11 is doing, and Windows 11
| AI functionality is going over like a lead balloon. The only
| open-weight models that can come close to major frontier models
| require hundreds of gigabytes of high bandwidth RAM/VRAM. Still,
| your average PC buyer isn't interested in running their own local
| LLM. The AMD AI Max and Apple M chips are good for that audience.
| Consumer dedicated GPUs just don't have enough VRAM to load most
| modern open-weight LLMs.
|
| I remember when LLMs were taking off, and open-weight were
| nipping at the heels of frontier models, people would say there's
| no moat. The new moat is high bandwidth RAM as we can see from
| the recent RAM pricing madness.
| havblue wrote:
| I think the moral of the story is just don't buy any electronics
| until you absolutely have to now: your laptop, your desktop, your
| car, your phone, your tv's. Go third party for maintenance when
| you can. Install Linux when you can. Only buy things that can be
| maintained and enjoy what you have.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I got a new Subaru and the touchscreen is making me insane. I
| will avoid electronics in cars as much as possible going
| forward.
|
| It literally has a warning that displays every time you start
| the car: "Watching this screen and making selections while
| driving can lead to serious accidents". Then you have to press
| agree before you can use the A/C or stereo.
|
| Like oh attempting to turn the air conditioner on in your car
| can lead to serious accidents? Maybe you should rethink your
| dashboard instead of pasting a warning absolving you of its
| negative effects?
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