Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dell admits consumers don't care about AI PCs

pcgamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 418 posts

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

#31

Post by mossTechnician »

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…

> 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"!

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

#32

Post by plasticsoprano »

everdrive wrote: post #30
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…

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.

Amen! This is part of the overall societal decline of no failing for anyone. You gotta feel the pain to get the growth.

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

#33

Post by ishtanbul »

m348e912 wrote: post #9

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.

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!).

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

#34

Post by PunchyHamster »

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.

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.

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

#35

Post by mort96 »

mossTechnician wrote: post #31
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…

> 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…

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.

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

#36

Post by PunchyHamster »

voidfunc wrote: post #16
notatoad wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 goin…

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

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

#37

Post by ambicapter »

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…

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.

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

#39

Post by extraduder_ire »

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.

Dell are less beholden to shareholder pressure than others, Michael Dell owns 50% of the company since it went public again.
Post reply on HN