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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

#241

Post by FridgeSeal »

fragmede wrote: post #92
slg wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

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?

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!”

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

#242

Post by martinald »

Maxatar wrote: post #182
martinald wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

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

#243

Post by hacker_homie »

Galanwe wrote: post #150

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?

I used https://github.com/rvaiya/keyd with ``` [ids] * [main] f23 = oneshot(control) [control] toggle(control) ``` To turn it back into a ctrl key

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

#244

Post by martinald »

zozbot234 wrote: post #159
martinald wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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 reg…

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.

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

#245

Post by FridgeSeal »

macintux wrote: post #206
robrain wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When bubbles burst, is it really the billionaires who are hit the hardest? I'm skeptical.

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.

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

#246

Post by FridgeSeal »

tliltocatl wrote: post #210
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…

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.

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.

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

#247

Post by FridgeSeal »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #186
jorvi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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!

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

#248

Post by thisislife2 »

ori_b wrote: post #184
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 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.

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.

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

#249

Post by zozbot234 »

martinald wrote: post #244
zozbot234 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reg…

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.

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.

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

#250

Post by havblue »

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.
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