Comment by Morromist
2 days ago
I was in the market for a laptop this month. Many new laptops now advertise AI features like this "HP OmniBook 5 Next Gen AI PC" which advertises:
"SNAPDRAGON X PLUS PROCESSOR - Achieve more everyday with responsive performance for seamless multitasking with AI tools that enhance productivity and connectivity while providing long battery life"
I don't want this garbage on my laptop, especially when its running of its battery! Running AI on your laptop is like playing Starcraft Remastered on the Xbox or Factorio on your steamdeck. I hear you can play DOOM on a pregnancy test too. Sure, you can, but its just going to be a tedious inferior experiance.
Really, this is just a fine example of how overhyped AI is right now.
Laptop manufacturers are too desperate to cash on the AI craze. There's nothing special about an 'AI PC'. It's just a regular PC with Windows Copilot... which is a standard Windows feature anyway.
>I don't want this garbage on my laptop, especially when its running of its battery!
The one bit of good news is it's not going to impact your battery life because it doesn't do any on-device processing. It's just calling an LLM in the cloud.
That's not quite correct. Snapdragon chips that are advertised as being good for "AI" also come with the Hexagon DSP, which is now used for (or targeted at) AI applications. It's essentially a separate vector processor with large vector sizes.
> It's just a regular PC with Windows Copilot... which is a standard Windows feature anyway.
"AI PC" branded devices get "Copilot+" and additional crap that comes with that due to the NPU. Despite desktops having GPUs with up to 50x more TOPs than the requirement, they don't get all that for some reason https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/copilot-pc/323616/microsoft-...
Is Microsoft trying to help NPU chip makers?
When is Wintel going to finally happen?
Microsoft has roughly $102 billion in cash (+ short-term investments). Intel’s market value is approximately $176 billion.
I've never really understood why Microsoft helped Intel's bottom line over decades.
With Azure, Microsoft has even more reason to buy Intel.
Doesn't this lead to a lot of tension between the hardware makers and Microsoft?
MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.
Laptop manufacturers are making laptops that can run an LLM locally, but there's no point in that unless there's a local LLM to run (and Windows won't have that because Copilot). Are they going to be pre-installing Llama on new laptops?
Are we going to see a new power user / normal user split? Where power users buy laptops with LLMs installed, that can run them, and normal folks buy something that can call Copilot?
Any ideas?
It isn't just copilot that these laptops come with; manufacturers are already putting their own AI chat apps as well.
For example, the LG gram I recently got came with just such an app named Chat, though the "ai button" on the keyboard (really just right alt or control, I forget which) defaults to copilot.
If there's any tension at all, it's just who gets to be the default app for the "ai button" on the keyboard that I assume almost nobody actually uses.
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> MS wants everyone to run Copilot on their shiny new data centre, so they can collect the data on the way.
MS doesn't care where your data is, they're happy to go digging through your C drive to collect/mine whatever they want, assuming you can avoid all the dark patterns they use to push you to save everything on OneDrive anyway and they'll record all your interactions with any other AI using Recall
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It's just marketing. The laptop makers will market it as if your laptop power makes a difference knowing full well that it's offloaded to the cloud.
For a slightly more charitable perspective, agentic AI means that there is still a bunch of stuff happening on the local machine, it's just not the inference itself.
Copilot is a local LLM (well SLM). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/phi-silica
There's nothing special with what Intel has lowered the bar as an AI PC so vendors can market it. Ollama can run a 4b model plenty fine on Tiger Lake with 8gb classic RAM.
But unified memory IS truly what makes an AI ready PC. The Apple Silicon proves that. People are willing to pay the premium, and I suspect unified memory will still be around and bringing us benefits even if no one cares about LLMs in 5 years.
Even collecting and sending all that data to the cloud is going to drain battery life. I'd really rather my devices only do what I ask them to than have AI running the background all the time trying to be helpful or just silently collecting data.
Copilot is just ChatGPT as an app.
If you don't use it, it will have no impact on your device. And it's not sending your data to the cloud except for anything you paste into it.
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>> I'd really rather my devices only do what I ask them to
Linux hears your cry. You have a choice. Make it.
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AI PCs also have NPUs which I guess provide accelerated matmuls, albeit less accelerated than a good discrete GPU.
I have a Snapdragon laptop and it is the best I've ever had. But the NPU is really almost useless.
This is a nice companion to the article: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2965927/the-great-npu-failur...
Agreed, I have the ARM based T14s for work.
The thing is nowhere near the performance as a macbook, but its silent and the battery lasts ages, which is a far cry from the same laptop with an Intel CPU, which is what many are running.
Company removes a lot of the AI bloat though.
> Running AI on your laptop is like playing Starcraft Remastered on the Xbox
A great analogy because there is Starcraft for a console - Nintendo 64 - and it is quite awkward. Split-screen multiplayer included.
It’s true that the AI marketing is largely nonsense, but the NPUs also don’t hurt, and you don’t have to make use of them.
Factorio runs really well on the deck though...
But yeah, fresh install of OS is a must for any new computer.