Dell is now shifting it focus this year away from being ‘all about the AI PC.’
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Honestly, that’s pretty quick to learn that lesson. Huge corporations usually take way longer to figure that sort of thing out. Usually not until it’s too late.
I would speculate it means they either run on thinner margins than the companies that are all-in on AI, or they have less money available to throw around in the equipment hoarding wars. Or who knows, maybe someone with actual sense is heading the part of the company in charge of that decision. But I find the first two more likely.
It’s also very likely that they have a significant amount of corporate customers actively saying they won’t purchase AI-oriented hardware for security reasons, so they’re trying to spin the consumer angle publicly to try and grab the holdouts everyone else is obviously abandoning/ignoring as a side effect. That may be giving them too much credit, but despite just being okay at just about everything, they’re still one of the large OEMs that has survived.
This also makes sense. Dell is massive in the dataceneters. As a consultant I’ve worked with Dell hardware far more than anything else. I will say, just about every customer I’ve worked with is interested in AI, but they want to run their own models, not some half baked thing from Dell.
The were also the ones to pioneer what I think was called “JIT2” or something like that. Basically it was a “just in time” scenario where they only kept 2 hours worth of parts at the factory. They would literally have trucks of parts lined up in the parking lot to unload for that days build. It shaved a massive amount of debt off as they wouldn’t have to stockpile parts and could change much more rapidly. That’s probably what’s allowing them to pivot in this case.
Dell actually needs to sell computers to stay in business, unlike these big tech companies which make money just from existing.
well ig DELL is joining the corporation pack that dislikes
AI or criticize it:
IIRC: its Valve and Dreamworks that do it
and now its DELL with both“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,” admits Kevin Terwilliger, Dell’s head of product, in the PC Gamer interview. “In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome.”
They’re just going to try to market it a little differently
Yeah, thanks for pointing this out. I think a couple here haven’t read the article fully.
They’re doing it, they’re just not pushing it because they see the reaction.
Yeah this is a really out of touch answer. Not a surprise really.
WTF even is an “AI PC”? I saw an ad for some AI laptop. To my knowledge, nobody is running LLMs on their personal hardware, so do these computers have like…a web browser?
To my knowledge, nobody is running LLMs on their personal hardware
They absolutely are.
Statistically relevant portion?
You know they were hyperbolic.
“To my knowledge” really doesn’t feel like hyperbole at all, IMO
Do 5% of people you know use local LLMs?
If so, you don’t know a lot of people, or you are heavy into the lLLM scene.
Do 5% of people you know watch hockey regularly? If not, I guess it must not be a real sport, and that definitely has absolutely nothing to do with your own bubble
Surprisingly a lot of people around me watch hockey.
And I also hear about a lot of people watching it.
But even though I’m very much into IT, I know very few people who selfhost. Despite that being a small community, local genAI seems even smaller that that.
It’s two things:
- a machine that has NN-optimized segments on the CPU, or a discrete NPU
- microslop’s idiotic marketing and branding around trying to get everyone to use Copilot
You can run it on your laptop, I’ve tried it before (PS e.g. https://www.nomic.ai/gpt4all, it’s fun to dig through your documents, but it wasn’t as useful as I thought it would be in collecting ideas), what is truly hard is to train. But yeah, what is an AI PC? Is it like a gaming rig with lotsa RAM and GPU(s)?
It seems my laptop at work has a neural chip. I guess a special ai only gpu. I don’t think I could care less about a laptop feature.
Lots of people are. Typically it means they have an NPU.
I’m talking about an ad I saw on broadcast television during a football game. I don’t think the broad market of people are downloading models from huggingface or whatever.
The ad you saw said no one was running local AI?
The ad was people doing generic AI stuff. I think it was even showing Copilot.
Either way, the marketing for AI is far to nebulous for it to matter. Just looking for the ad, I found plenty (like this one) that explicitly mention “on-device AI,” but show people just searching for shit or doing nebulous office work. This ad even shows generating images in MS Paint which offloads the AI shit to the cloud.
Ah yeah that’s true. Just marketing BS to sell hardware mostly.
Computers now come with a NPU (Neural Process Unit) to do that job… So yeah.
What kind of consumer-facing software runs on that NPU?
For what it’s worth an NPU is why your phone could tell you that photo is of a cat years before LLMs were the hot new thing. They were originally marketed as accelerators for machine learning applications before everybody started calling that AI.
I know Video editing software uses it for things like motion tracking.
It’s all stuff your GPU can do, but the NPU can do it for like 1/10th to 1/100th the power.
New versions of Sony Vegas use the NPU to enhance AI features, nothing that humans cannot do before.
Sony still makes laptops? TIL
Running an LLM locally is entirely possible with fairly decent modern hardware. You just won’t be running the largest versions of the models. You’re going to run ones intended for local use, almost certainly Quantized versions. Those usually are intended to cover 90% of use cases. Most people aren’t really doing super complicated shit with these advanced models. They’re asking it the same questions they typed into Google before, just using phrasing they used 20+ years ago with Ask Jeeves.
Not sure what the dell computers are doing but with something like Alpaca it’s pretty easy to run local LLMs
It is quite easy to run a distilled local model using a decent rig. I have one in that I use right from the terminal.
The last time my wife bought a Dell PC, she became an Apple customer. She wanted to avoid the Apple tax but ended up dealing with bloatware, crashes, a slow PC and their horrible customer service.
I’ve bought multiple dell PCs for my business. No issues from any. The only annoying bloat is windows. That’s not to say there ain’t bloat, but it’s nothing compared to windows, which is on every other commercial computer availabke for business.
I care about AI PCs in that I actively do not want one. It’s not that I’m indifferent.
I’m looking for an android smart watch and I’m annoyed at how many come with interactive AI, which I also do not want.
Garmin makes some decent hardware. The software is okay.
I hear pebble is crowdfunding again as well.
I was kind of looking at the OnePlus Watch 3
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I like sex.
I don’t like companies forcing sex on me so they can collect data to sell ads.
When the discussions about AI are about the latter, I’m just going to say I don’t like it without needing to clarify.
Yes, it’s useful for things like text to speech that doesn’t sound like a Speak & Spell or motion detection that doesn’t go off because a bug flew past the camera. I consider stuff like LLMs that will lie to me useless though.
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Yeah I don’t mind AI as another tool in the tool belt, but it’s being forced as the magic one-size-fits-all solution. Also the AI tools must be opt-in by default.
We don’t care about dell anymore either. They have reduced the quality and standardization of their offerings to the point they are worse than just about any other ‘brand’.
I don’t necessarily hate AI, but I’ll use it when I want to use it not when my system wants me to use it.
I do necessarily hate AI and I will never use it even with a gun to my head
I can respect that. There are a lot of evils evolved in that world.
Whoever is making the decisions at Dell just made a very wise one. I’d expect IBM to be the most pragmatic but maybe I missed the news about them
IBM got out of the retail desktop/laptop market in 2005 when they sold their product lines (like Thinkpad) to a company in China called Lenovo.
I meant AI in general in respect to IBM
IBM has been all in on AI for like 20 years.
How long has Watson been out?
And yet they’ve been wildly shrewd about it even in todays world of hype
I like ai. For real. When I want to go there and use it. I open the browser, type to Gemini and use it. Hate it when it is all over everything, especially where you don’t need an AI. Glad they got it
Its not that I don’t care, its that they are too expensive & the monopolies want to exert control over the market. I considered buying a Ryzen AI Max+ 395. They actually had some okay deals for a bit, but they are still pretty inferior to GPU-accelerated solutions which are completely overpriced. Much of this was intentional, although RAM has recently seen more demand than supply. For a long time though, they were restricting the hardware & VRAM in GPUs though not because of price, but because it would take away from much of the dominance cloud-AI providers had, and also do so at the peril of them no longer being able to read & spy on your every conversation.
That is why IMO the US will lose the AI-race. Not because we don’t have smart people, but because capitalism is anti-innovation.
