AI computers aren’t selling because users don’t care

If I want at AI I have a multitude of options. It's baked into my editors and easily available on the web. I just paste some crap into a text box and we're off to the races.
I don't want it in my OS. I don't want it embedded in my phone. I'll keep disabling it as long as that is an option.

Imagine that, a new fledgingly technology hamfistedly inserted into every part of the user experience, while offering meager functionality in exchange for the most aggressive data privacy invasion ever attempted on this scale, and no one likes it.

I think people care.
They care so much they actively avoid them.

Gen AI should be private, secure, local and easier to train by it's users to fit their own needs. Closest thing to this at the moment seems to be Kobold.

Y'all remember when 3D TVs were going to be revolutionary?
- @Agent641 @dgerard remember when it was INEVITABLE that the deeds to your house were going to be an NFT?
  
  3D TVs I can see happening, if there's some breakthrough that fixes the current tech shortcomings .
  But NFTs, and blockchain in general? Hahahahhah.

Reducing computer performance:
Turbo button 🤝 AI button
- now that you mention it, kinda surprised I haven't ever seen a spate of custom 3D-printed turbo buttons from overclocker circles
  
  it could turn on the RGB! though that would imply that the RGB could be turned off in the first place, which is optimistic on my part
  
  I had one on my PC in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I honestly can't think of any practical use case for AI in my day-to-day routine.
ML algorithms are just fancy statistics machines, and to that end, I can see plenty of research and industry applications where large datasets need to be assessed (weather, medicine, ...) with human oversight.
But for me in my day to day?
I don't need a statistics bot making decisions for me at work, because if it was that easy I wouldn't be getting paid to do it.
I don't need a giant calculator telling me when to eat or sleep or what game to play.
I don't need a Roomba with a graphics card automatically replying to my text messages.
Handing over my entire life's data just so a ML algorithm might be able to tell me what that one website I visited 3 years ago that sold kangaroo testicles was isn't a filing system. There's nothing I care about losing enough to go the effort of setting up copilot, but not enough to just, you know, bookmark it, or save it with a clear enough file name.
Long rant, but really, what does copilot actually do for me?
- Our boss all but ordered us to have IT set this shit up on our PCs. So far I've been stalling, but I don't know how long I can keep doing it.
  
  Set it up. People have to find out by themselves.
  
  Tell your boss you talked to legal and they caution that all copilot data is potentially discoverable.
- same here, i mostly dont even use it on the phone. my bro is into it thought, thinking ai generate dpicture is good.
  
  It's a fun party trick for like a second, but at no point today did I need a picture of a goat in a sweater smoking three cigarettes while playing tic-tac-toe with a llama dressed as the Dalai Lama.
- I use it to speed up my work.
  For example, I can give it a database schema and ask it for what I need to achieve and most of the time it will throw out a pretty good approximation or even get it right on the first go, depending on complexity and how well I phrase the request. I could write these myself, of course, but not in 2 seconds.
  Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
  Then there's just convenience things. At what date and time will something end if it starts in two weeks and takes 400h to do? There's tools for that, or I could figure it out myself, but I mean the AI is just there and does it in a sec...
  
  adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization
  I have used a system wide service in macOS for that for decades by now.
  
  it’s really embarrassing when the promptfans come here to brag about how they’re using the technology that’s burning the earth and it’s just basic editor shit they never learned. and then you watch these fuckers “work” and it’s miserably slow cause they’re prompting the piece of shit model in English, waiting for the cloud service to burn enough methane to generate a response, correcting the output and re-prompting, all to do the same task that’s just a fucking key combo.
  Same with text formatting, for example. I regularly need to format long strings in specific ways, adding brackets and changing upper/lower capitalization. It does it in a second, and really well.
  how in fuck do you work with strings and have this shit not be muscle memory or an editor macro? oh yeah, by giving the fuck up.
  
  presumably everyone who has to work with you spits in your coffee/tea, too?
- The only feature that actually seems useful for on-device AI is voice to text that doesn't need an Internet connection.
  
  As someone who hates orally dictating my thoughts, that's a no from me dawg, but I can kinda understand the appeal (though I'll note offline TTS has been around for like a decade pre-AI)
- Apparently it's useful for extraction of information out of a text to a format you specify. A Friend is using it to extract transactions out of 500 year old texts. However to get rid of hallucinations the temperature reds to be 0. So the only way is to self host.
  
  Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't get rid of hallucinations.
  It might slightly increase accuracy, but it's still going to go wrong.
  
  Well, LLMs are capable (but hallucinant) and cost an absolute fuckton of energy. There have been purpose trained efficient ML models that we've used for years. Document Understanding and Computer Vision are great, just don't use a LLM for them.

I would actively avoid the extra hassle of an AI computer.

Don’t care AND are not stupid.

My problem is that it's not that fucking useful. I got the Pixel 9 specifically because of its advertised AI chip for the assistant and I swear it's just gotten worse since the Pixel 7. I used to be able to ask Google anything through the assistant, and now 90% of my questions are answered with "can't find the information."
They also advertised (or at least heavily alluded to) the use of the AI chip when you are in low network areas but it works just as good outside of 4g+ coverage as it ever did without the stupid chip.
Whats the point of adding AI branded nonsense if there's no practical use for it. And that doesn't even start to cover the issues with AI's reliability as a source of information. Garbage in = garbage out.
- When Gemini can find the information, they added flowery "social" bullshit before, in the middle and after the information I asked for wasting my time
- i dint get a pixel for that reason after PIxel 5a died, the exonys chip is significantly weaker than other flagship phones, and they sacrificed thier battery power/efficiency capacity since 5A(which was a very defective phone) just to prop up AI.
  We know google was saving money on not using QUALCOMM/snapdragon chips, which most others are using. AI is just thier excuse so they can put less effort into making quality product.

That's not fair! I care! A lot!
Just had to buy a new laptop for new place of employment. It took real time, effort, and care, but I've finally found a recent laptop matching my hardware requirements and sense of aesthetics at a reasonable price, without that hideous copilot button :)
- Which laptop did you buy if you don't mind sharing?
- quite annoyed that the Snapdragon laptops are bootlocked cos they'd make great Linux boxes
  
  How are they bootlocked? Just need the right iso. I have done it, because I didn't know they came with Linux for this particular client and they put windows on it, had to get a specific iso to reinstall when they borked it.

The average technical person realises ai is shit.
The average non-technical person doesn't need an ai computer, because chatgpt is free.
- not exactly true on the 2nd one, just because cpgt exist is not the reason an average person believes they dont need AI. they know AI is shit from the get-go, doesnt take a programming genius to realizing, when you know that only the corporations are the only ones obsessed with it, and it hadnt produced any valuble product.
  and then had to deal with many AI system, like chat boxes, or google searches,, especially on reddit.

Fuck AI

Oh we care alright. We care about keeping it OUT of our FUCKING LIVES.

No thanks. I’m perfectly capable of coming up with incorrect answers on my own.
- you're right tho

I care. I care enough to crater copilot.

WTF is an AI computer? Is that some marketing bullshit?
- Yes.
- "Y2k ready" vibes.
- afaict they're computers with a GPU that has some hardware dedicated to the kind of matrix multiplication common in inference in current neural networks. pure marketing BS because most GPUs come with that these days, and some will still not he powerful enough to be useful
- @Matriks404 @dgerard got it in one! It's MS's marketing campaign for PCs with a certain amount of "AI" FLOPS
  
  IDK if the double pun was intended, but a FLOPS is a measurement of how many (floating point) operations can a computer make per second

Even non tech people I talk to know AI is bad because the companies are pushing it so hard. They intuit that if the product was good, they wouldn't be giving it away, much less begging you to use it.
- customers dont want AI, but only thhe corporation heads seem obssed with it.
- You're right - and even if the user is not conscious of this observation, many are subconsciously behaving in accordance with it. Having AI shoved into everything is offputting.
  
  Speaking of off-putting, that friggin copilot logo floating around on my Word document is so annoying. And the menu that pops up when I paste text — wtf does "paste with Copilot" even mean?

One of the mistakes they made with AI was introducing it before it was ready (I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible). It will be extremely difficult for any AI product to shake the reputation that AI is half-baked and makes absurd, nonsensical mistakes.
This is a great example of capitalism working against itself. Investors want a return on their investment now, and advertisers/salespeople made unrealistic claims. AI simply isn’t ready for prime time. Now they’ll be fighting a bad reputation for years. Because of the situation tech companies created for themselves, getting users to trust AI will be an uphill battle.
- The battle is easy. Buy out and collude with the competition so the customer has no choice but to purchase a AI device.
  
  Ah, like with the TPM blackbox?
  
  This would only work for a service that customers want or need
- Apple Intelligence and the first versions of Gemini are the perfect examples of this.
  iOS still doesn’t do what was sold in the ads, almost a full year later.
  Edit: also things like email summary don’t work, the email categories are awful, notification summaries are straight up unhinged, and I don’t think anyone asked for image playground.
  
  Insert 'Full Self Driving' Here.
  Also, outlook's auto alt text function told me that a conveyor belt was a picture of someone's screen today.
  
  Apple Intelligence and the first versions of Gemini are the perfect examples of this.
  Add Amazon's Alexa+ to that list. It's nearly a year overdue and still nowhere in sight.
- capitalism working against itself
  More like: capitalism reaching its own logical conclusion
- I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible
  To be honest it feels more and more like this is simply not possible, especially regarding the chatbots. Under those are LLMs, which are built by training neural networks, and for the pudding to stick there absolutely needs to have this emergent magic going on where sense spontaneously generates. Because any entity lining up words into sentences will charm unsuspecting folks horribly efficiently, it’s easy to be fooled into believing it’s happened. But whenever in a moment of despair I try and get Copilot to do any sort of task, it becomes abundantly clear it’s unable to reliably respect any form of requirement or directive. It just regurgitates some word soup loosely connected to whatever I’m rambling about. LLMs have been shoehorned into an ill-fitted use case. Its sole proven usefulness so far is fraud.
  
  There was research showing that every linear jump in capabilities needed exponentially more data fed into the models, so seems likely it isn't going to be possible to get where they want to go.
- Yeah but first to market is sooooo good for stock price. Then you can sell at the top and gtfo before people find out it's trash
- (I’m making a generous assumption by suggesting that “ready” is even possible)
  It was ready for some specific purposes but it is being jammed into everything. The problem is they are marketing it as AGI when it is still at the random fun but not expected to be accurate phase.
  The current marketing for AI won't apply to anything that meets the marketing in the foreseeable future. The desired complexity isn't going to exist in silicone at a reasonable scale.
- I they didn't over promise, they wouldn't have had mountain loads of money to burn, so they wouldn't have advanced the technology as much.
  Tech giants can't wait decades until the technology is ready, they want their VC money now.
  
  Sure, but if the tech in the end doesn't deliver it's all that money burnt.
  If it does deliver it's still oligarchs deciding what tech we get.

they are useless... Copilot is not worth even $50 of an update

Most features are relabelled years old shit...google on tap is now gemini screen search.
Things like chatbots have gotten better but bleh, I dont want to give up my privacy for this shit

The only real purpose of AI is to get sweet VC money. Beyond that...
- The fuck does Microsoft need VC money for?
  
  They don't, its data mining.

AI is going to be this eras Betamax, HD-Dvd, or 3d TV glasses. It doesn't do what was promised and nobody gives a shit.
- Betamax had better image and sound, but was limited by running time and then VHS doubled down with even lower quality to increase how many hours would fit on a tape. VHS was simply more convenient without being that much lower quality for normal tape length.
  HD-DVD was comparable to BluRay and just happened to lose out because the industry won't allow two similar technologies to exist at the same time.
  Neither failed to do what they promised. They were both perfectly fine technologies that lost in a competition that only allows a single winner.
  
  BluRay was slightly better if I recall correctly. With the rise in higher definition televisions, people wanted to max out the quality possible, even if most people (still) can’t tell the difference
  
  Afaik betamax did not have any porn content, which might have contributed to the sale of VHS systems.
- I was just about to mention porn and how each new format of the past came down to that very same factor.
  If AI computers were incredible at making AI porn I bet you they'd be selling a lot better haha
- Dude don’t throw Betamax in there, that was a better product than the VHS. AI is just ass.
- Betamax actually found use in Television broadcast until the switch to HDTV occurred in 2009
  
  No, it didn't.
  
  the later digital variants of beta weren't retired by sony until ~ 2016.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and everyone else is hyping up AI. Consumers are not really seeing much benefit by making everything AI-ified. Executives are raving over it but maybe aren't realize that people outside of the C-suite aren't that excited? Having it shoved in our faces constantly, or crammed in places companies hope they can save money is not helping either.
- It's FOMO amplified by capitalistic competition. No company wants to be the one left behind. I guarantee Google, Meta and even OpenAI know the limitations of their products. They don't care, they just want to be at least as good as their competitors, because they assume at some point one of them will reach "good enough." And at that moment, if they're not in position to grab market share, they'll lose a once-in-a-generation chance for billions or trillions of dollars in value.
  We're the casualties, because the people in the middle - companies with no AI but whose C-suite buys into the hype - demand we use unworkable products because they're too willfully ignorant to know they're not panaceas to whatever is bothering those C-suite execs at the moment.
  
  Quarterly Driven Development

Oh hey, I got one of those buttons on my new laptop that literally never booted into Windows. Pressing it Linux says it's "Meta + CTRL" (I think), which is pretty useful. Got it for the good price/performance/build-quality ratio.
Didn't yet find a good use for that fancy NPU, the XDNA driver just arrived a month ago or so. Perhaps for use with Upscayl or something actually useful.
- Technically it's Meta+Shift+F23
  
  Now it's up to the Linux desktop environments for determining what to do if the new Copilot key is pressed.
  launch ELIZA obv

I don't even want Windows 11 specifically because of AI. It's intrusive, unnecessary, and the average person has no use for it. The only time I have used AI for anything productive was when I needed to ask some very obscure questions for Linux since I'm trying to get rid of Windows entirely.

Can the NPU be used for practical purposes other than generative AI? If not, I don't need it.
- It depends on how broad you are with the definition. There are a lot of uses for an NPU that aren't hosting your own chatgpt analog.
  
  list them, as far as I can tell NPUs are shitty cut-down GPUs with a few functions much slower

Google, Facebook, etc. have been burning money to gain market share and "good will" from users knowing that when the money faucet stopped or if they found a way to make money, they'd abuse their market share and squeeze their users for profit.
Once interest rates increased and the VC infinite money glitch went away (borrow at low interest rates, gamble on companies, repeat), the masks came off and the screws started turning, hard. Anything they can do to monetize anyone else involved, they're trying.
The same story has been happening with AI but without the infinite money glitch - just investors desperate for a good bet getting hyped to hell and back. They need adoption and they need business to become dependent on their product. Each of these companies are basically billions in the hole on AI.
Users, especially technical users, should know that not only is the product failing to live up to the hype but that embracing AI is basically turning the other cheek for these companies to have their way with your wallet even faster and more aggressively than they already are with everything else they've given away.

Nein!
- Doch!
  
  Ooh!

Local AI kind of sucks right now, and everything is massively over branded as AI ready these days.
There aren’t a lot of compelling local use cases and the memory constraints of local mean you end up with fairly weak models.
You need a high end high memory local setup to get decent token rates, and I’m finding right now 30-70b models are the minimum viable size.
That doesn’t compare with speed of online models running on GPUs that cost more than luxury cars.

- I will not go into ethics.
  then stop wasting our fucking time
  I didn’t read the rest of your post but it’s vaguely LLM-shaped so off you fuck
- Your first line is a confession that you are a bad person.
- Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can’t trust it,
  I can trust a calculator that uses so little electricity that it works with ambient light. Why would I want to use an untrustworthy AI?
  
  Fucking blood diamonds that don't even cut glass.
  
  me: writing software for a calculator I don’t even own yet so I can maybe hopefully have a pocket version of one of the only good products of the first AI boom
  them: Math Yes, it is fairly good at math. You can’t trust it,
- this post has been deleted as a prion

Ai bro here. The reason there shit aint selling is because its useless for any actual ai aplication. Ai runs on gpus even an ai cpu will be so much slower than what an nvidea gpu can do. Of course no one buys it. Nvideas gpus still sell very well, and not just because of the gamers.
- ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “useful for any actual ai application” is to throw a shitload of money at nvidia. weird how that works!
- A lot of these systems are silly because they don't have a lot of RAM and things don't begin to get interesting with LLMs until you can run 70B and above
  The Mac Studio has seemed an affordable way to achieve running 200B+ models mainly due to the unified memory architecture (compare getting 512GB of RAM in a Mac Studio to building a machine with enough GPU to get there)
  If you look the industry in general is starting to move towards that sort of design now
  https://frame.work/desktop
  The framework desktop for instance can be configured with 128GB of RAM ($2k) and should be good for handling 70B models while maintaining something that looks like efficiency.
  You will not train, or refine models with these setups (I think you would still benefit from the raw power GPUs offer) but the main sticking point in running local models has been VRAM and how much it costs to get that from AMD / Nvidia
  That said, I only care about all of this because I mess around with a lot of RAG things. I am not a typical consumer
  
  ah yes the only way to make LLMs, a technology built on plagiarism with no known use case, “not silly” is to throw a shitload of money at Apple or framework or whichever vendor decided to sell pickaxes this time for more RAM. yes, very interesting, thank you, fuck off

People expect AI to be default feature. Image search was once what was "AI". Photo recognition was once what was "AI". Voice recognition was once what was "AI". These all fall under the field of AI/ML. It's until the next state of the art comes along. Then it's no longer "AI" but a standard feature.
I have no idea why this phenomenon is but that's the way it's been. When the field of AI/ML makes its leap to the next frontier. The current "AI" which is LLMs will longer be "AI" but a standard feature.
Maybe because fictional media as set the goalpost at AGI. So nobody is expecting to be buying "AI" hardware until they are buying an AGI machine that is a conscious cybernetic lifeform. Otherwise practical AI as we know it is assumed to be just another software package that runs on any computer.
- you know you could just write your own posts, right? it’s free! you don’t need to regurgitate the marketing that’s being pushed by all these vendors. they already have paid marketers to push the bilge
- people expect a Cylon level level of AI intelligence or skynet, both are quite similar fictional concepts. funny thing in the cylons case, it was based of the brainwaves of a human girl, that was replicated into robots, which developed thier own AI/conscieness overtime.

The only issue here is that there is no really useful ubiquitous feature yet. Once that comes, people will not care about any security issues or any other reason against it. It's coming for sure. Maybe they need recall feature to train right now, maybe they won't anymore at some point.
- @PixelatedSaturn @dgerard
  It’s coming for sure
  You got a source for this?
  
  At first I was skeptical of the guy who told me, but they seemed rich and therefore trustworthy.