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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

#341

Post by optimalquiet »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #294
mjfisher wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what are those things from windows 95/98 I might miss? Rose tinted glasses perhaps, but I remember it as a very straightforward and consistent UI that provided great feedback, was snappy and did everything I needed. Up to and including little hints for power users like underlining shortcut letters for the & key.

I miss my search bar actually being a dumb grep of my indexed files. It's still frustrating typing 3 characters, seeing the result pop up in the 2nd key stroke, but having it transform into something else by the time I process the result.

Inevitably windows search fails to highlight what I’m looking for almost all of the time, and often doesn’t even find it at all. If I have an application installed, it picks the installer in the downloads folder. If I don’t have an app installed, it searches Bing for it. Sometimes it even searches when I do have the application installed!

Microsoft seems not to believe that users want to use search primarily as an application launcher, which is strange because Mac, Linux, and mobile have all converged on it.

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

#342

Post by pxc »

zamadatix wrote: post #335
dworks wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we want as developers: To be able to implement functionality that utilizes a model for tasks like OCR, visual input and analysis, search or re-ranking etc, without having to implement an LLM API and pay for it. Instead we'd like to offer the functionality to users, possibly at no cost, and use their edge computing capacity to achieve it, by calling local protocols and models. What we want as users: To have advan…

What seems to be delivered by NPUs at this point: filtering background noise from our microphone and blurring our camera using a watt or two less than before.

If it really is a watt or two less, that's a lot on a laptop.

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

#343

Post by jychang »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #319
adastra22 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NPUs aren't meant for LLMs. There are a lot more neural net tech out there than LLMs.

> NPUs aren't meant for LLMs. There are a lot more neural net tech out there than LLMs. OK, but where can I find demo applications of these that will blow my mind (and make me want to buy a PC with an NPU)?

Best NPU app so far is Trex for Mac.

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

#344

Post by kalleboo »

martinald wrote: post #321
adastra22 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Apple's Photos app? Ever see those generated "memories," or search for photos by facial recognition? Where do you think that processing is being done? Your macbook's NPU is probably active every moment that your computer is on, and you just didn't know about it.

How often is the device either generating memories or I'm searching for photos? I don't use Apple Photos fwiw, but even if I did I doubt I'd be in that app for 1% of my total computer time, and of that time only a fraction of the time would be spent doing stuff on the ANE. I don't think searching for photos requires that btw, if they are already indexed it's just a vector search. You can use asitop to see how often i…

You also have Safari running OCR on every image and video on every webpage you load to let you select and copy text

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

#345

Post by bfrog »

NPU is space that would've probably been better put into something like a low power programmable DSP core, which they more or less are depending on which one you are looking at but with some preconceived ideas on how to feed the DSP its data and get the hardware working. You don't get to simply write programs on them usually from what I've seen.

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

#346

Post by withinrafael »

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 Copilot Runtime APIs to utilize the NPU are still experimental and mostly unavailable. I can't believe an entire generation of the Snapdragon X chip came and went without working APIs. Truly incredible.

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

#347

Post by ori_b »

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.

Yes, cutting wet wood on the sawstop sucks, but I put up with it. If clicking 'close' on the wrong tab amputated a finger, I'd also put up with it. However, I've closed plenty of tabs accidentally, and all my fingers are still attached.

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

#348

Post by ori_b »

abanana wrote: post #257
ericmcer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 elem…

> 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.

Yes. For example, Chrome literally just broke middle-click paste in this box when I was responding. It sets the primary selection to copy, but fails to use it when pasting.

Middle click to open in new tab is also reliably flaky.

I really miss the UI consistency of the 90s and early 2000s.

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

#349

Post by _carbyau_ »

Why would "consumers" as a whole care about an AI specific pc?

Consumers consciously choosing to play games - or serious CAD/image/video editing - usually note they will want a better GPU.

Consumers consciously choosing to use AI/llm? That's a subscription to the main players.

I personally would like to run local llm. But this is far from a mainstream view and what counts as an AI PC now isn't going to cut it.

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

#350

Post by thwarted »

Ekaros wrote: post #120
thwarted wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It just might be that lot of users watch same videos multiple times. They must have some data on this and see that recommending same videos gets more views than recommending new ones.

Is there a way to tell if people are seeking out the same video or or if they are watch it because it was suggested? Especially when 90% of the recommendations are repeats?

There isn't even an "I've watched this" or "don't suggest this video anymore" option. You can only say "I'm not interested" which I don't want to do because it will seems like it will downrank the entire channel.

Even if that is the case, I rarely watch the same video, so the recommendation engine should be able to pick that up.

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