Survey shows most people wouldn't pay extra for AI-enhanced hardware
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Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when...

Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when doing so seems strange and pointless.

Heavy investment and increasingly powerful hardware tend to mean more expensive products. To discover if people would be willing to pay extra for hardware with AI capabilities, the question was asked on the TechPowerUp forums.

The results show that over 22,000 people, a massive 84% of the overall vote, said no, they would not pay more. More than 2,200 participants said they didn’t know, while just under 2,000 voters said yes.

  • @[email protected]English
    57•4 months ago

    This is one of those weird things that venture capital does sometimes.

    VC is is injecting cash into tech right now at obscene levels because they think that AI is going to be hugely profitable in the near future.

    The tech industry is happily taking that money and using it to develop what they can, but it turns out the majority of the public don’t really want the tool if it means they have to pay extra for it. Especially in its current state, where the information it spits out is far from reliable.

    • @cheese_greaterEnglish
      34•4 months ago

      I don’t want it outside of heavily sandboxed and limited scope applications. I dont get why people want an agent of chaos fucking with all their files and systems they’ve cobbled together

      • FiveMacsEnglish
        9•4 months ago

        NDA also legally prevent you from using this forced garbage too. Companies are going to get screwed over by other companies, capitalism is gonna implode hopefully

    • @TenthrowEnglish
      23•4 months ago

      I have to endure a meeting at my company next week to come up with ideas on how we can wedge AI into our products because the dumbass venture capitalist firm that owns our company wants it. I have been opting not to turn on video because I don’t think I can control the cringe responses on my face.

    • TipRingEnglish
      11•4 months ago

      Back in the 90s in college I took a Technology course, which discussed how technology has historically developed, why some things are adopted and other seemingly good ideas don’t make it.

      One of the things that is required for a technology to succeed is public acceptance. That is why AI is doomed.

      • @[email protected]English
        4•4 months ago

        AI is not doomed, LLMs or consumer AI products, might be

        In industries AI is and will be used (though probably not LLMs, still, except in a few niche use cases)

        • TipRingEnglish
          6•4 months ago

          Yeah, I mean the AI being shoveled at us by techbros. Actual ML stuff is currently and will continue to be useful for all sorts on not-sexy but vital research and production tasks. I do task automation for my job and I use things like transcription models and OCR, my company uses smart sorting using rapid image recognition and other really cool uses for computers to do things that humans are bad at. It’s things like LLMs that just aren’t there - yet. I have seen very early research on AI that is trained to actually understand language and learns by context, it’s years away, but eventually we might see AI that really can do what the current AI companies are claiming.