"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," Terwilliger says bluntly. "In fact I think AI probably confuses them more than it helps them understand a specific outcome."

--------------

What we're seeing here is that "AI" lacks appeal as a marketing buzzword. This probably shouldn't be surprising. It's a term that's been in the public consciousness for a very long time thanks to fiction, but more frequently with negative connotations. To most, AI is Skynet, not the thing that helps you write a cover letter.

If a buzzword carries no weight, then drop it. People don't care if a computer has a NPU for AI any more than they care if a microwave has a low-loss waveguide. They just care that it will do the things they want it to do. For typical users, AI is just another algorithm under the hood and out of mind.

What Dell is doing is focusing on what their computers can do for people rather than the latest "under the hood" thing that lets them do it. This is probably going to work out well for them.

They still ship their laptops with the Copilot key. Once that is removed then their statement will follow their actions.

Unfortunately, their common sense has been rewarded by the stock tanking 15% in the past month including 4% just today alone. Dell shows why companies don't dare talk poorly of AI, or even talk about AI in a negative way at all. It doesn't matter that it's correct, investors hate this and that's what a ton of companies are mainly focusing on.

We do care. We REALLY don't want AI on by default on our PCs.

It seems many products (PCs, TVs, cars, kitchen appliances, etc.) have transitioned from "solve for the customer" to "solve for ourselves (product manufacturers) and tell the customer it's for them, even though it's 99% value to us and 1% value to them".

NPUs are just kind of weird and difficult to develop for and integration is usually done poorly.

Some useful applications do exist. Particularly grammar checkers and I think windows recall could be useful. But we don't currently have these designed well such that it makes sense.

Isn't the only AI PC a Mac Studio?

When NPU will become available in most systems, we will see learned indexes like in https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01208v1 on client side.

If file search indexes and such will be replaced by neural networks, this will be small but measurable improvement in battery life, speed and memory usage.

I'm not a game programmer, but is there a use case for NPUs in gaming? One idea: If you had some kind of open world game, like a modern role playing game, where the NPCs could have non-deterministic conversations (1990s-style: "talk with the villagers") that could be pretty cool. Are NPUs are a good fit for this use case?

Does anyone know: How do these vendors (like Dell) think normie retail buyers would use their NPUs?