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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

#351

Post by seabrookmx »

mjbale116 wrote: post #102

On the same note, whats going on with Dell's marketing lately? Dell, Dell Pro, Dell Premium, Dell _Pro_ Premium Dell Max, Dell _Pro_ max... They went and added capacitive keys on the XPS? Why would you do this... A lot of decisions that do not make sense to me.

The new XPS's that they just teased at CES bring back the real function keys and have a newly designed aluminum unibody.

I've shied away from Dell for a bit because I had two XPS 15's that had swelling batteries. But the new machines look pretty sweet!

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

#352

Post by mjevans »

bitwize wrote: post #179
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?

"WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?" "You multiply matrices of INT8s." "OH... MY... GOD" NPUs really just accelerate low-precision matmuls. A lot of them are based on systolic arrays, which are like a configurable pipeline through which data is "pumped" rather than a general purpose CPU or GPU with random memory access. So they're a bit like the "synergistic" processors in the Cell, in the respect that they accelerate some operatio…

So it's a higher power DSP style device. Small transformers for flows. Sounds good for audio and maybe tailored video flow processing.

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

#353

Post by wtetzner »

bitwize wrote: post #187
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…

At my current work much of our software stack is based on GOFAI techniques. Except no one calls them AI anymore, they call it a "rules engine". Rules engines, like LLMs, used to be sold standalone and promoted as miracle workers in and of themselves. We called them "expert systems" then; this term has largely faded from use. This AI summer is really kind of a replay of the last AI summer. In a recent story about expe…

Yeah, the problem with the term "AI" is that it's far too general to be useful.

I've seen people argue that the goalposts keep moving with respect to whether or not something is considered AI, but that's because you can argue that a lot of things computers do are artificial intelligence. Once something becomes commonplace and well understood, it's not useful to communicate about it as AI.

I don't think the term AI will "stick" to a given technology until AGI (or something close to it).

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

#354

Post by mjevans »

yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote: post #280
ericmcer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

It's a liability transfer. Thank corp legal.

How about a recall and replacement for that defective dashboard with one that doesn't cause distractions and accidents since it has buttons that can be felt even by someone wearing winter gloves?

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

#355

Post by zdragnar »

andrekandre wrote: post #331
zdragnar wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 depending on what it is, it would probably also cost less money (no paying for token usage), use less electricity and be more reliable (less probabilistic, more deterministic), and easier to maintain (just fix the bug in the code vs prompt/input spe…

... And the people at the top are only asking for it because it sounds really good to investors and shareholders. "Powered by AI" sounds way fancier and harder to replace than "power by simple string searches and other heuristics"

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

#356

Post by cookiengineer »

bitwize wrote: post #179
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?

"WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?" "You multiply matrices of INT8s." "OH... MY... GOD" NPUs really just accelerate low-precision matmuls. A lot of them are based on systolic arrays, which are like a configurable pipeline through which data is "pumped" rather than a general purpose CPU or GPU with random memory access. So they're a bit like the "synergistic" processors in the Cell, in the respect that they accelerate some operatio…

My question is: Isn't this exactly what SIMD has done before? Well, or SSE2 instructions?

To me, an NPU and how it's described just looks like a pretty shitty and useless FPGA that any alternative FPGA from Xilinx could easily replace.

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

#357

Post by recursivecaveat »

cookiengineer wrote: post #356
bitwize wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"WHAT IS MY PURPOSE?" "You multiply matrices of INT8s." "OH... MY... GOD" NPUs really just accelerate low-precision matmuls. A lot of them are based on systolic arrays, which are like a configurable pipeline through which data is "pumped" rather than a general purpose CPU or GPU with random memory access. So they're a bit like the "synergistic" processors in the Cell, in the respect that they accelerate some operatio…

My question is: Isn't this exactly what SIMD has done before? Well, or SSE2 instructions? To me, an NPU and how it's described just looks like a pretty shitty and useless FPGA that any alternative FPGA from Xilinx could easily replace.

You definitely would use SIMD if you were doing this sort of thing on the CPU directly. The NPU is just a large dedicated construct for linear algebra. You wouldn't really want to deploy FPGAs to user devices for this purpose because that would mean paying the reconfigurability tax in terms of both power-draw and throughput.

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

#358

Post by throwaway2037 »

I'm not a game programmer, but is there a use case for NPUs in gaming? One idea: If you had some kind of open world game, like a modern role playing game, where the NPCs could have non-deterministic conversations (1990s-style: "talk with the villagers") that could be pretty cool. Are NPUs are a good fit for this use case?

Does anyone know: How do these vendors (like Dell) think normie retail buyers would use their NPUs?

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

#359

Post by SomeHacker44 »

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.

Also the Copilot button/key is useless. It cannot be remapped to anything in Ubuntu because it sends a sequence of multiple keycodes instead if a single keycode for down and then up. You cannot remap it to a useful modifier or anything! What a waste of keyboard real estate.

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

#360

Post by physicles »

greenchair wrote: post #240
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.

I've got one anecdote: friend needed Live Captions for a translating job and had to get copilot+ PC just for that.

What software are they using for that, and how did they know ahead of time that the software would use their NPU?
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