alt Hacker News> It's not that Dell doesn't care about AI or AI PCs anymore, it's just that over the past year or so it's come to realise that the consumer doesn't.
I wish every consumer product leader would figure this out.
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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.
Dell are less beholden to shareholder pressure than others, Michael Dell owns 50% of the company since it went public again.
Meanwhile we got Copilot in Notepad.
I think part of the issue is that it's hard to be "exciting" in a lot of spaces, like desktop computers.
People have more or less converged on what they want on a desktop computers in the last ~30 years. I'm not saying that there isn't room for improvement, but I am saying that I think we're largely at the state of "boring", and improvements are generally going to be more incremental. The problem is that "slightly better than last year" really isn't a super sexy thing to tell your shareholders. Since the US economy has basically become a giant ponzi scheme based more on vibes than actual solid business, everything sort of depends on everything being super sexy and revolutionary and disruptive at all times.
As such, there are going to be many attempts from companies to "revolutionize" the boring thing that they're selling. This isn't inherently "bad", we do need to inject entropy into things or we wouldn't make progress, but a lazy and/or uninspired executive can try and "revolutionize" their product by hopping on the next tech bandwagon.
We saw this nine years ago with "Long Blockchain Ice Tea" [1], and probably way farther back all the way to antiquity.
Companies don’t really exist to make products for consumers, they live to create stock value for investors. And the stock market loves AI
Treating consumers as customers, good.
There is place for it but it is insanely overrated. AI overlords are trying to sell incremental (if in places pretty big) improvement in tools as revolution.
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 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 with low effort. The end result is I only have to deal with that annoying popup when I really am glad it is there.
That is a trivial example but you can imagine how a locally run LLM that was just part of the SDK/API developers could leverage would lead to better UI/UX. For now everyone is making the LLM the product, but once we start building products with an LLM as a background tool it will be great.
It is actually a really weird time, my whole career we wanted to obfuscate implementation and present a clean UI to end users, we want them peaking behind the curtain as little as possible. Now everything is like "This is built with AI! This uses AI!".