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Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

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Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#141

Post by wrl »

ericmcer wrote: post #25
FfejL wrote: post #10

> 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.

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…

> 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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#142

Post by martinald »

disfictional wrote: post #132

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.

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#143

Post by xgkickt »

tecoholic wrote: post #119
yalogin wrote: post #27

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.…

Nailed it? Maybe close. They still have a keyboard button dedicated to Copoilot. That thing can’t be reconfigured easily.

Can PowerToys remap it?

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#144

Post by skrebbel »

pseudosavant wrote: post #133

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.

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#145

Post by [deleted] »

wredcoll wrote: post #90
wavemode wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sawstop is not AI

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.

[deleted]

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#146

Post by 9rx »

wrl wrote: post #141
ericmcer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 th…

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#147

Post by criddell »

kingstnap wrote: post #43

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.

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.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#148

Post by recursive »

xnx wrote: post #88

> 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.

How is saving costs a cop out? That's a genuine goal of most businesses.

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#149

Post by martinald »

kenjackson wrote: post #140
pseudosavant wrote: post #133

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.

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?

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).

Re: Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

#150

Post by Galanwe »

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?

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