It's propaganda, as the article points out: "The chipmaker, which is quite keen to see people buy the AI PCs sold by its hardware partners,"

What would be the point of an "AI PC" if not to run models locally? I'm very much uncomfortable with sending my keystrokes (or my codebase) off to some remote server. If I can run the model locally, the privacy problems in theory vanish and I'm much more likely to use the tech.

If folks don't understand that, then yes I'd say it's a pretty big misconception and needs to be better marketed as a key feature.

And if the AI PC is just a regular PC with a cloud bot integrated, then ... what even is the point? You can already do the remote chatbot thing with a regular PC, privacy nightmares included!

Do the AI PCs do the work locally or transmit everything remotely for processing like chatgpt?

It's also not a misconception that "AI" PCs are for creative/technical professionals when the vast majority of the marketing is about shitting out creative(?) or technical(?) works(?) to reduce and ultimately democratize that workforce.

There is absolutely zero meaning that can be derived from that marketing blurb.

> pages are really getting extreme with the AI stuff in a weird SEO-like way

you mean in a weird generative AI way?

Jesus christ. Someone's getting fucking piledrived... six times!

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you...

In the 90's there were "Multimedia PCs"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC

Assuming AI means LLM, at this stage I've come across two broad categories of implementation that are actually interesting and useful to me as a user.

1) A box on the screen where I can chat with one to do ideation or really anything I want.

2) A command-driven approach where I hit a hotkey, type a prompt and the response is dumped out in front of me, possibly I had some text selected which heavily influences the response.

These are both pretty cool tbh and developers will have a field day for years finding sensible ways to incorporate them into programs.

None of this has anything to do with driving the hardware upgrade cycle since most of the models are running in the cloud. But driving hardware upgrades is what these marketing people are really trying to do when they talk about AI PC. They are irrelevant people, but they need to convert everything they see into a reason to buy a new PC.

That's what they get paid for. Monkey marketer see trend, monkey marketer do marketing. Monkey steal your attention.

Maybe a LLM will replace THEM soon. After all it's basically a digital version of the million monkeys on typewriters...

I think we just have a tendency to anthropomorphize things that are a bit too complicated to understand fully. Like a child calling the clutch mechanism in a yo-yo a "brain" for example. It's not that the yo-yo can really think, it's just that it has a behavior that seems that way. So indeed once you've upgraded your system to the point of not fully understanding how something that isn't a human could achieve whatever emergent behavior occurs, go ahead and anthropomorphize it by calling it AI.

There's not a specific line in the sand, although tasking it with machine learning (in which outcomes improve based on collecting runtime inputs, rather than based only on its creator adding capabilities) would be a decent one. That's fairly human-like, while non-ML workloads are more plant-like.

Their execs are probably all subscribed to the same corporate leadership magazines?

Just as with 3D televisions, be patient and this trend will pass.

Fun fact: a "learning curve" was originally statistical evidence of a system getting better at something. It used to indicate that there can be improvement over initial performance when a process is repeated. I find it interesting that the meaning has shifted now to "this is hard at first" or "it takes a while to get results".

> Commercial software and ignorance make users less productive...

This is exactly what I have observed too. Notice how all commercial software comes very polished and modern with a very superficial UI. Despite most software products being hundreds of times more complex than simple electronic gadgets, such gadgets often come with more complex manuals.

It's obvious that the true end-game of AI is not to make end users more productive, but rather de-skill end-users and make them entirely beholden to third-party software. Most companies would love the tradeoff of making their employees more like cogs at the cost of lower productivity.

Alas, I too am held hostage by Emacs as most software doesn't even come close to the flexibility it provides.