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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

#71

Post by wredcoll »

wavemode wrote: post #44
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. 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…

> The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct.

Sawstop literally patented this and made millions and seems to have genuinely improved the world.

I personally am a big fan of tools that make it hard to mangle my body parts.

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

#72

Post by Auracle »

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.

Expensive now is super cheap 10 years from now though.

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

#73

Post by Traster »

Fundamentally when you think about it, what people know today as AI are things like ChatGPT and all of those products run on cloud infrastructure mainly via the browser or an app. So it makes perfect sense that customers just get confused when you say "This is an AI PC". Like, what a weird thing to say - my smartphone can do ChatGPT why would I buy a PC to do that. It's just a totally confusing selling point. So you ask the question why is it an AI PC and then you have to talk about NPUs, which apart from anything else are confusing (Neural what?) but bring you back to this conversation:

What is an NPU? Oh it's a special bit of hardware to do AI. Oh ok, does it run ChatGPT? Well no, that still happens in the cloud. Ok, so why would I buy this?

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

#74

Post by mandevil »

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…

The difference between "AI" and "linear regression" is whether you are talking to a VC or an engineer.

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

#75

Post by JohnFen »

beloch wrote: post #28

"We're very focused on delivering upon the AI capabilities of a device—in fact everything that we're announcing has an NPU in it—but what we've learned over the course of this year, especially from a consumer perspective, is they're not buying based on AI," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome." -------------- What we're seeing here…

> People don't care if a computer has a NPU

I actually do care, on a narrow point. I have no use for an NPU and if I see that a machine includes one, I immediately think that machine is overpriced for my needs.

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

#76

Post by wavemode »

wredcoll wrote: post #71
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…

> The hammer doesn't decide that the thing it's swinging at is vaguely thumb-shaped and self-destruct. Sawstop literally patented this and made millions and seems to have genuinely improved the world. I personally am a big fan of tools that make it hard to mangle my body parts.

sawstop is not AI

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

#78

Post by delaminator »

GeekyBear wrote: post #70

There is one feature that I do care about. Local speech recognition is genuinely useful and much more private than server based options.

Whisper works great, even the medium model is pretty good.

But I use the 3Gb all day every day.

I built a personal voice agent

https://github.com/lawless-m/TheHand

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

#79

Post by giancarlostoro »

jorvi wrote: post #56
yalogin wrote: post #27

They nailed it. Consumers don't care about AI, they care about functionality they can use, and care less if it uses AI or not. It's on the OS and apps to figure out the AI part. This is why even though people think Apple is far behind in AI, they are doing it at their own pace. The immediate hardware sales for them did not get impacted by lack of flashy AI announcements. They will slowly get there but they have time.…

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.

TTS is absolutely horrible on iOS. I have nearly driven into a wall when trying to use it whilst driving and it goofs up what I've said terribly. For the love of all things holy, will someone at Apple finally fix text to speech? It feels like they last touched it in 2016. My phone can run offline LLMs and generate images but it can't understand my words.

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

#80

Post by fragmede »

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…

You and I live in different bubbles. ChatGPT is the go-to for my non-techie friends to ask for advice on basically everything. Women asking it for relationship advice and medical questions, to guys with business ideas and lawsuit stuff.
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