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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
There are a number of NPUs that plug into an m.2 slot. If those aren’t powerful enough, you can just use an eGPU.
I would rather not have to pay for an NPU that I’m probably not going to use.I’m not that concerned with the hardware limitations. Nobody is going to run a full-blown LLM on their laptop, running one on a desktop would already require building a PC with AI in mind. What you’re going to see being used locally are going smaller models (something like 7B using INT8 or INT4). Factor in the efficiency of an NPU and you could get by with 16GB of memory (especially if the models are used in INT4) with little extra power draw and heat. The only hardware concern would be the technological advancement speed of NPUs, but just don’t be an early adopter and you’ll probably be fine.
But this is where Dells point comes in. Why should the consumer care? What benefits do consumers get by running a model locally? Outside of privacy and security reasons you’re simply going to get a better result by using one of the online AI services because you’d be using a proper model instead of the cheap one that runs with limited hardware. And even for the privacy and security minded people you can just build your own AI server (maybe not today but when hardware prices get back to normal) that you run from home and then expose that to your laptop or smartphone. For consumers to desire running a local model (actually locally and not in a selfhosting kind of way) there would have to be some problem that the local model solve that the over the internet solution can’t solve. So far such a problem doesn’t exist today and there doesn’t seem to be a suitable problem on the horizon either.
Dell is keeping their foot in the door by still implementing NPUs into their laptops, so if by some miracle some magical problem is found that AI solves they’re ready, but they realize that NPUs are not something they can actually use as a selling point because as it stands, NPUs solve no problems because there’s no benefit to running small models locally.
More to the point, the casual consumer isn’t going to dig into the nitty gritty of running models locally and not a single major player is eager to help them do it (they all want to lock the users into their datacenters and subscription opportunities).
On the Dell keeping NPUs in their laptops, they don’t really have much of a choice if they want modern processors, Intel and AMD are all-in on it still.
Setting up a local model was specifically about people who take privacy and security seriously because that often requires sacrificing convenience, which in this case would be having to build a suitable server and learning the necessary know-how of setting up your own local model. Casual consumers don’t really think about privacy so they’re going to go with the most convenient option, which is whatever service the major players will provide.
As for Dell keeping the NPUs I forgot they’re going to be bundled with processors.
My general point is that discussing the intricacies of potential local AI model usage is way over the head of the people that would even in theory care about the facile “AI PC” marketing message. Since no one is making it trivial for the casual user to actually do anything with those NPUs, then it’s all a moot point for this sort of marketing. Even if there were an enthusiast market that would use those embedded NPUs without a distinct more capable infrastructure, they wouldn’t be swayed/satisfied with just ‘AI PC’ or ‘Copilot+’, they’d want to know specs rather than a boolean yes/no for ‘AI’.
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Where in their comment does it say “exactly zero users”? Oh right, it doesn’t
I think part of the idea is: build it and they will come… If 10% of users have NPUs, then apps will find ‘useful’ ways to use them.
Part of it is actually battery life - if you assume that in the life of the laptop it will be doing AI tasks (unlikely currently) an NPU will be wayyyy more efficient than running it on a CPU, or even a GPU.
Mostly though, it’s because it’s an excuse to charge more for the laptop. If all the high end players add NPUs, then customers have no choice but to shell out more. Most customers won’t realise that when they use chat got or copilot one one of these laptops, it’s still not running on their device.
Phones have already came with ai processors for a long time, specifically for speech recognition and camera features, its not advertised because its from before the bubble started
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We should have been given a choice whether we want to use it or not, them trying to force it on us is why they are getting so much pushback, let those that want to use it use it and those that don’t want it to be given the option to turn it off, it’s not rocket science, but they are constantly going:
Tech CEOs - this is our AI you have to use it! Consumers - but i don’t want to! Tech CEOs - FUCKING USE IT!!!
and then they are whining "WAAAHHHHH PEOPLE ARE MEANIES THAT DON’T LIKE OUR AI THAT DOES NOTHING TO IMPROVE THEIR LIVES AND WILL MAKE US MORE MONEY BY LETTING US PUT TARGETED ADS INTO THEIR EYEBALLS WWWWAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
But think about the shareholders, how are they going to pay off their trillion dollar debts building data centers? You need to use it, replace all aspects of your life with AI, then they can squeeze you!
There was a scene in a kinda shitty movie The Scorpion King starring The Rock where he was buried and just his head was sticking out and huge red ants were coming to eat his face, i mean i would care, that they would scream too much and scare the ants, poor things are hungry, but they are so disgusting that the ants would probably walk past them thinking it’s camel shit…
For me at least, AI reminds me too much of that thrice cursed MS Word paperclip. I did not want it then and I do not want it now.
Also, adding ‘personality’ to pieces of software is cringy at best and downright creepy at worst.
Forget about the personality for a minute. They have a different thing in common. Uselessness. I tried AI for a bunch of general use cases and it almost always fails to satisfy. Either it just can’t do the task in the first place or it makes mistakes that then cost too much time to fix.
There are exceptions and specialized models will have their use but it’s not the Swiss army knife tool AI companies are promising.
AI hardware is a sales pitch without a clear product. Consumers have no clue why they would want to buy something with AI on it.
For most consumers AI is a webpage that kids cheat on homework or adults attempt to cheat at work with. It makes ugly fake pictures with all sorts of weird errors. Its also the annoying as fuck answering services that you have to yell at 4 or 5 times to get to a real person.
Why would an AI PC be desirable?
The world is healing
I’m readying for some new bullshit. I just hope it’s not tech related
Does a third world war count as tech related? It certainly uses a lot of tech!
Why not just leave it alone inside a browser tab? If I want AI, and I use it quite a lot, I will go into their website. Don’t force it system wide, just sucks
They want their greasy tendrils all up in your PC’s guts. Every bit of info flowing in your system can be monetized. All they care about is money and dominance and their “AI” in everyone’s devices is their wet dream.
Cancer is preferable to tech bros as cancer doesn’t know its killing the host. Tech bros know full well their actions are killing the planet and its inhabitants. Their actions are willfully vile and toxic; completely at odds with the needs of humanity.
Don’t expect them to ever do the right thing for anyone but themselves.
This is pretty much a “all Tech companies have to jump on the AI hype train” pressure on publicly traded companies and those who need lots of investor money, and little if at all customer pressure.
All investors want their money to be in the same place as those who invested in Google before it made it big, and the AI hype promises exactly that to the “winners” of the AI race.
Customer needs and demands are well below secondary to investor pressure, especially for companies which have dominant market positions (so general customers have no decent alternatives) and startups whose entire business model is AI.
Stolen from BSKY
That is gold
This is extra funny to me since I just re-watched this episode the other day
Weirdly dell always seems to understand what normal users want.
The problem is normal users have beyond low expectations, no standards and are ignorant of most everything tech related.
They want cheap and easy to use computers that require no service and if there is a problem a simple phone number to call for help.
Dell has optimized for that. So hate em or not, while their goods have gone to shit quality wise. They understand their market and have done extremely well in servicing it.
Thus I am not surprised at all dell understood this. If anything I would have been more surprised if they didn’t.
I think they all understand what we want (broadly), they just don’t care, because what they want is more important, and they know consumers will tolerate it.
They care, they just care differently. What they want is money, so they’re trying to find what the maximum price is they can sell the minimum amount of product for.
If they can dress that up as “caring for the consumer” it’s a bonus.
You’re not thinking about the bigger picture. They can sell you an irrepairable device, design it to fail after a short time so you have to buy another one, upsell you on useless AI shit to pump up investments, and load it with a bunch of invasive software so they can collect and sell information about you. None of this has anything to do with what you, the consumer, want, and they know that, but they don’t care, because it’s not what makes them money.
And yet just before looking at Lemmy I got an ad for the Dell AI laptop on YouTube (on my TV, still need to get a piHole up and running).
on YouTube (on my TV, still need to get a piHole up and running
Unfortunately that won’t help. The Youtube ads are served from the same domains as the videos, so a DNS based blocker is inherently powerless.
FWIW, Linux + FireFox + Ublock still blocks 100% of YouTube ads for me.
Can confirm, Firefox with uBlock Origin works. The OS doesn’t seem to matter. I use that combination on Linux (Fedora 43), Windows (10), macOS (15) and Android (16), no YouTube ads anywhere.
Just stop using the TV like that. Hook up a small Linux computer via hdmi and use that instead.
I have an older MacBook with standard hdmi, but there are some creators I really like on YouTube and we have an ancient Roku stick that still works. The remote is convenient and I usually go pee during the ads.
Jesus, is that how long youtube ads are these days?
Yeah but the decent thing is that they show you how long before you can skip. So you know how long you have.
Not good for the WAF
What companies actually make decent mid-range laptops these days?
Framework makes some very high quality laptops. Have one myself.
I’ve got a framework 13 but I wouldn’t suggest them for casual users. They’re very expensive for the specs.
Seconded on Framework. I’ve got the more performant (but more heavy, large, and expensive) 16, but for most people the 13 will be perfectly usable. The newer 12 model also seems pretty decent and is a bit cheaper.
They’ve kept their RAM prices relatively stable too, but if you already have other RAM lying around you can just bring your own and save yourself the money. Same for the SSD.
The main downside is they’re gonna be quite expensive upfront compared to alternatives, so I wouldn’t recommend them to someone price-sensitive, especially in the current economy.
The main benefit is that since they’re so modular and upgradable, you’ll save money down the line on repair services, replacement parts, or just the cost of buying a whole new device because one component broke that they don’t sell replacements for.
How is their site (and product) as an option for your non-techy mum? Also does shipping end up being exorbitant if you’re not in the same country they’re based in?
They have a fully prebuilt option for every computer. Which works well for non-techy people.
No clue what shipping is like in your country. Was fine for me in the US.
> 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 ThinkPadIt 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?)
If you’re still reading this: I modified the code of the language server, so it now works with KATE…
They said they still adding all of it. They are adding ai. Just not talking about it. Which is probably correct 😂
Disappointing that the new XPS doesn’t use CAMM2
I actually do care about AI PCs. I care in the sense that it is something I want to actively avoid.
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Well, first Dell’s use of ‘confused’ is mainly a way to walk “away” from AI as a marketing strategy without having to walk it “back” (they can’t walk it back: Microsoft will keep Copiloting it up, the processor comparies will keep bundling NPUs, and the consumer exposure to AI will continue to have nothing to do with any of the ‘AI PC’ or not). So ‘confused’ is a way to rationalize the absence of ‘AI PC’ in their marketing strategy without having to actually change what they are doing.
But to the extent ‘confusing’ may apply, it’s less about ‘AI’ and more about ‘AI PC’. What about this ‘AI PC’ would impact your usage with AI, for most people the answer is ‘not at all’, since mostly it’s over the internet. So for the layperson, an ‘AI PC’ just enables a few niche Windows features no one cares about. Everything pushing around the ‘AI’ craze is well away from actually running on the end user devices.
if “I” were the one confused, then AI would actually be USEFUL.
The ‘quiet part out loud’ isn’t being used how it should be
Microsoft appears to genuinely believe that AI features are what customers want even if they don’t directly ask for it, nobody asked for Google’s AI feature but it’s hugely popular, people freakin love it (except here on Lemmy of course where it’s the devil), Google see that users are staying on their site longer and not clicking through to sites as much which is a win for them and a win for users
A real quiet part out loud would be ‘Microsoft knows its users don’t like its AI features but don’t care because Windows isn’t a money maker for them compared to Microsoft Copilot 365’
Is that a win for Google, though? They make most of their money from AdSense, because websites want to display ads. If people aren’t clicking through to websites from their search results, that seems like fewer opportunities to display ads, reducing the viability of AdSense.
seems like so far things are going well, businesses spend more on ads on google 🙃
Google, for now, is still laughing its way to the bank. The search giant is putting advertisers’ ads within or directly above and below AI Overviews themselves. As Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview last year, “If you put content and links within AI Overviews, they get higher clickthrough rates than if you put it outside of AI Overviews.” Organic links are pushed down.
Even in 2024, market research company SparkToro’s study of searchers found “almost 30 percent of all clicks go to platforms Google owns.” For every 1,000 Google searches in the United States, 360 clicks go to a non-Google-owned, non-Google-ad-paying property. With the rise of AI Overview, Google’s share can only have grown, while everyone else’s has shrunk.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/29/opinion_column_google_ai_ads/
I believe maps and youtube were money losers for google for a very long time but the goal was to keep people within the google ecosystem where they can extract money from users in other ways
The real ‘quiet part’ would be that they are avoiding it because a large number of people hate ‘AI’. To say they are ‘confused’ is still keeping the quiet part quiet…
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.
What do you mean? Do you even have ANY foundation to this accusation?
Hold on, I need to turn off my heater. 22211123222234663fffvsnbvcsdfvxdxsssdfgvvgfgg
There it is. The off button. Touch controls are so cool guys.
Ha! Enjoy your off button while they still make them. Once our AI Overlords have won the War, you can only politely ask your laptop to please temporarily quiet itself, please and thank you if it’s not too much asking.
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.
A cheap NPU could have some uses. If you have a background process that runs continuously, offloading the work to a low-cost NPU can save you both power and processing. Camera authorization, if you get up, it locks; if you sit down, it unlocks. No reason to burn a core or GPU for that. Security/Nanny cameras recognition. Driving systems monitoring a driver losing consciousness and pulling over. We can accomplish this all now with CPUs/GPUs, but purpose-built systems that don’t drain other resources aren’t a bad thing.
Of course, there’s always the downside that they use that chip for recall. Or malware gets a hold of it for recall, ID theft, There’s a whole lot of bad you can do with a low-cost NPU too :)
