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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

#191

Post by rchaud »

vitaflo wrote: post #66
alexb_ wrote: post #2

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.

Should have stayed private. Then they wouldn’t have to care what investors think.

The whole point of going private is to make the private equity partners a boatload of money by going public again in the future.

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

#192

Post by tantalor »

rsynnott wrote: post #176

Well, yes, Dell, everyone knows that, but it is _most_ improper to actually _say_ it. What would the basilisk think?!

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?

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

#193

Post by tryauuum »

thwarted wrote: post #26
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…

YouTube could use AI to not recommend videos I've already watched, which is apparently a really hard problem.

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

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

#194

Post by rchaud »

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.

Discrete GPU + laptop means 2 hours of battery life. The average customer isn't buying those.

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

#195

Post by jay_kyburz »

SoftTalker wrote: post #164
yalogin wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

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.

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

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

#196

Post by heavyset_go »

GrantMoyer wrote: post #151
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.

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.

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.

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

#197

Post by mghackerlady »

fhd2 wrote: post #178
mirekrusin wrote: post #169

Isn't the only AI PC a Mac Studio?

According to ancient Apple ads, a "Mac" is not a "PC".

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

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

#198

Post by janalsncm »

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.

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.

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

#199

Post by heavyset_go »

martinald wrote: post #142
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 wh…

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.
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