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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

#251

Post by zdragnar »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #233
wrl wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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.

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

#252

Post by FridgeSeal »

lurking_swe wrote: post #113
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…

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 smar…

> 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.

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

#253

Post by zozbot234 »

sosodev wrote: post #231
kenjackson wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 ha…

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.

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

#254

Post by zozbot234 »

krooj wrote: post #232
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.

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.

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.

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

#255

Post by projektfu »

xgkickt wrote: post #143
tecoholic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can PowerToys remap it?

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.

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

#256

Post by platevoltage »

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.

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.

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

#257

Post by abanana »

ericmcer wrote: post #125
wavemode wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> 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.

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

#258

Post by scblock »

xgkickt wrote: post #143
tecoholic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can PowerToys remap it?

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).

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

#259

Post by ericmcer »

havblue wrote: post #250

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.

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?

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

#260

Post by fragmede »

heavyset_go wrote: post #196
GrantMoyer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.
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