Technology

What a trash click bait headline. That's not how the statement "saying the quiet part out loud" works. This isn't a secret and it's not unspoken and it certainly doesn't not reveal some underlying motive.

It doesn't confuse us... it annoys us with the blatant wrong information. e.g. glue is a pizza ingredient.

I actually do care about AI PCs. I care in the sense that it is something I want to actively avoid.

I want to run LLMs locally, or things like TTS or STT locally so it’s nice but there’s no real support rn

Most people won’t care nor use it

LLMs are best used when it’s a user choice, not a platform obligation

Yeah, I'm not sure what the point of a cheap NPU is.

If you don't like AI, you don't want it.

If you do like AI, you want a big GPU or to run it on somebody else's much bigger hardware via the internet.

They said they still adding all of it. They are adding ai. Just not talking about it. Which is probably correct 😂

> be me
> installed VScode to test whether language server is just unfriendly with KATE
> get bombarded with "try our AI!" type BS
> vomit.jpg
> managed to test it, but the AI turns me off
> immediately uninstalled this piece of glorified webpage from my ThinkPad

It seems I'm having to do more jobs with KATE. (Does the LSP plugin for KATE handle stuff differently from the standard in some known way?)

The world is healing

Stolen from BSKY

What people don't want is blackbox AI agents installed system-wide that use the carrot of "integration and efficiency" to justify bulk data collection, that the end user implicitly agrees to by logging into the OS.

God forbid people want the compute they are paying for to actually do what they want, and not work at cross purposes for the company and its various data sales clients.

I'd much rather have a more powerful generic CPU than a less powerful generic CPU with an added NPU.

There are very few people who would benefit from an added NPU, ok I hear you say what about local AI?

Ok, what about it?

Would you trust a commercial local AI tool to not be sharing data?

Would your grandmother be able to install an open source AI tool?

What about having enough RAM for the AI tool to run?

Look at the average computer user, if you are on lemmy, chances are very high that you are far more advanced than the average computer user.

I am talking about those users who don't run Adblocker, don't notice the YT ad skip button and who in the past would have installed a minimum of of five toolbars in IE, yet wouldn't have noticed the reduced view of the actual page.

These people are closer to the average users than any of us.

Why do they need local AI?

Not the position Dell is taking, but I've been skeptical that building AI hardware directly into specifically laptops is a great idea unless people have a very concrete goal, like text-to-speech, and existing models to run on it, probably specialized ones. This is not to diminish AI compute elsewhere.

Several reasons.

• Models for many useful things have been getting larger, and you have a bounded amount of memory in those laptops, which, at the moment, generally can't be upgraded (though maybe CAMM2 will improve the situation, move back away from soldered memory). Historically, most users did not upgrade memory in their laptop, even if they could. Just throwing the compute hardware there in the expectation that models will come is a bet on the size of the models that people might want to use not getting a whole lot larger. This is especially true for the next year or two, since we expect high memory prices, and people probably being priced out of sticking very large amounts of memory in laptops.

• Heat and power. The laptop form factor exists to be portable. They are not great at dissipating heat, and unless they're plugged into wall power, they have sharp constraints on how much power they can usefully use.

• The parallel compute field is rapidly evolving. People are probably not going to throw out and replace their laptops on a regular basis to keep up with AI stuff (much as laptop vendors might be enthusiastic about this).

I think that a more-likely outcome, if people want local, generalized AI stuff on laptops, is that someone sells an eGPU-like box that plugs into power and into a USB port or via some wireless protocol to the laptop, and the laptop uses it as an AI accelerator. That box can be replaced or upgraded independently of the laptop itself.

When I do generative AI stuff on my laptop, for the applications I use, the bandwidth that I need to the compute box is very low, and latency requirements are very relaxed. I presently remotely use a Framework Desktop as a compute box, and can happily generate images or text or whatever over the cell network without problems. If I really wanted disconnected operation, I'd haul the box along with me.

EDIT: I'd also add that all of this is also true for smartphones, which have the same constraints, and harder limitations on heat, power, and space. You can hook one up to an AI accelerator box via wired or wireless link if you want local compute, but it's going to be much more difficult to deal with the limitations inherent to the phone form factor and do a lot of compute on the phone itself.

EDIT2: If you use a high-bandwidth link to such a local, external box, bonus: you also potentially get substantially-increased and upgradeable graphical capabilities on the laptop or smartphone if you can use such a box as an eGPU, something where having low-latency compute available is actually quite useful.

Dell is the first Windows OEM to openly admit that the AI PC push has failed. Customers seem uninterested in buying a laptop because of its AI capabilities, likely prioritizing other aspects such as battery life, performance, and display above AI.

Silicon Valley always had the annoying habit of pushing technology-first products without even much consideration of how they would solve real world problems. It always had it, but it's becoming increasingly bad. When Zuck unveiled the Metaverse it was already starting to be ludicrous, but with the AI laptop wave it turned into Onion territory.

Doesn't confuse me, just pisses me off trying to do things I don't need or want done. Creates problems to find solutions to

Holy crap that Recall app that "works by taking screenshots" sounds like such a waste of resources. How often would you even need that?

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/the-verdict-is-in-windows-recall-is-great-actually

Virtually everything described in this article already exists in some way...