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’.

The issue is that to the extent that might even make sense, no major player is actually doing anything to help that happen. Every big player is exclusively focused on taking AI use cases into their datacenters, because that’s the way to maintain control and demand subscriptions.

If you did do it, then the users would complain that the ‘AI feature’ as executed on their puny NPU is really slow compared to what the online alternative does.

So that scenario is a hypothetical, and they are trying to make sales based on now. ‘AI PC’ doesn’t make any sense because people imagine what you describe, but in reality just cannot tell a difference because nothing works any differently for their ‘AI experience’. Their experience is going to be a few niche Windows features work that most people don’t even know about or would want.

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.

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…

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.

It’s just a softer thing to say than ‘a lot of people hate AI and it’s alienating potential customers’. They can’t come out and say that out loud, they don’t want to piss off Microsoft too much and they aren’t going to try to do NPU-free systems (it’s not really possible). They aren’t going to do anything to ‘fight back’ against the AI that people hate (they can’t), so their best explanation as to why they pull back from a toxic brand strategy is that ‘people just don’t care’ rather than ‘people hate this thing that we are going to keep feeding’.

But if they need to rationalize the perspective, an “AI” PC does nothing to change the common users experience with the AI things they know, does not change ChatGPT or Opus or anything similar, that stuff is entirely online. So for the common user, all ‘AI’ PC means is a few Windows gimmicks that people either don’t care about or actively complained about (Recall providing yet another way for sensitive data to get compromised).

In terms of “AI” as a brand value, the ones most bullish about AI are executives that like the idea of firing a punch of people and incidently they actually want to buy fewer PCs as a result. So even as you can find AI enthusiastic people, they still don’t want AI PCs.

For most people, their AI experience has been:

• News stories talking about companies laying off thousands or planning to lay off thousands for AI, AI is the enemy
• News stories talking about some of those companies having to rehire those people because AI fell over, AI is crap
• Their feeds being flooded with AI slop and deepfakes, AI is annoying
• Their google searches now having a result up top that, at best, is about the same as clicking the top non-sponsored link, except that it frequently totally botches information, AI is kind of pointless

For those that have actually positive AI experience, they already know it has nothing to do with whether the PC is ‘AI’ or not. So it’s just a brand liability, not a value.

Outlook not so good… nailed that one too.

Inspired by your comment, I polled ChatGPT 5 direct and Copilot itself, and ChatGPT was smarter than the executive by saying it was a bad idea, while Copilot itself said it might be a bad idea, but it’s aligned with Microsoft’s vision, which may be more important, but ultimately seemed to have no idea if it was a good idea or bad idea…

So I guess ChatGPT at least is smarter than the MS CEO. Of course Copilot seemed primed to try to favor and vindicate Microsoft’s decision. I tried a more aggressive statement that it was stupid to try to get that ‘I agree with you by default’ and it still tried to soften the perspective in favor of Microsoft.

As a bonus, I asked if it would be a good idea to rename LibreOffice to LibreSidekick. It looked more like the ChatGPT 5 answer for Office to Copilot, saying it’s a dumb idea, until the end when it said unless it has an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot, then it would be a good idea…

Oh phone trees are terrible, I refer exclusively to online self service. I suppose an LLM might be able to help a caller connect to the correct set of humans better than phone trees…

If I’m resorting to phone, it’s because I really really need a human. I know there still exist some very old people stuck calling… But if they can’t work your online portal, they won’t be able to work a phone tree either…

The robo-bullshit is great, if the thing has no nuance. Self checkout, paying bills, buying stuff online.

The things is those things are great because they are so predictable. LLM takes the predictability out. It’s also generally not allowed to do anything that the self service portal was not allowed to do, so you get stuck with a more imprecise interface instead of the nice, precise interface of a traditional portal, and no access to more nuanced help. It’s the worst of both worlds.

Yeah, have a new executive who managed a vaguely segment appropriate “hello world” with code gen and so regularly rants about why we should be paying human developers.

The biggest improvement on the user side was to stop trying to weigh the bagging area to prevent loss.

The newer machine vision based systems are less likely to screw up. “Unexpected item in bagging area” was an almost universal experience, nowadays I have only been flagged for human review once.

Also, one store I was at just lets you put your items under a camera without finding barcodes, and you just confirm the identified products.

Think the issue is either a self service portal that works in very predictable way (like the self checkout) or a human to deal with nuance.

To the extent an LLM might be useful, it’s likely blocked from doing so because the operator doesn’t trust it either.

The biggest annoyance is that the LLM support tends to more aggressively refuse to bring a human in.

Considering a lot of the full YouTube videos are full of padding, taking over ten minutes to get to the point, I can understand why the shorts would have appeal.

Problem is one way or another people are being incentivized to target a specific runtime regardless of whether they have the material to fit.

Well yeah, I would assume Steam would be a big priority for this scenario…

Had a relative with a toddler that almost died due to his GCM overreporting his levels.

My mom had one and learned immediately not to trust it.

I’m shocked that both people I know personally had those devices turn out to be uselessly inaccurate…

Nah, AI code gen bugs are weird. As a person used to doing human review even from wildly incompetent people, AI messes up things that my mind never even thought needed to be double checked.

Oh man, I remember marveling at BeOS in the day and for a brief moment in time when SSDs first hit the scene you could have a credibly fast Windows boot… Nowadays it’s worse than ever despite super fast storage, fastest CPUs, and gobs of RAM…

There was a while back some Windows developer externally lamenting how ass-backwards they were and as a result their NT kernel was woefully under-featured compared to other contemporary OSes…

Then I think they forced him to take it back and say ‘um actually our kernel is actually super awesome, my mistake’.

They did not, they had some touch screen button.

They basically needlessly increased risk for the sake of avoiding optics of a safety driver with direct controls possible.