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.

  • @corroded
    3•2 months ago

    When MMX first came out, the advertisements didn’t say “a new CPU with vectorized extensions.” They said “MULTIMEDIA!” which happened to be the popular tech buzzword at the time. I think this is a lot of the same. The buzzword is “AI,” not “matrix processing” or whatever an NPU actually does.

    While shoehorning AI into every tech product is ridiculous, having a CPU with accelerated data processing features will almost certainly be useful for other workloads in the future.

    I’ll admit, I’m not exactly up to speed on what integrated NPUs bring to the table, but I’ve written plenty of code that leverages MMX/AVX instructions for things completely unrelated to multimedia. I expect this will end up being the same.

    • @[email protected]English
      3•2 months ago

      That’s a good point, but really all that means is it might be of use in a few years once all the hype BS bathwater has washed away and we can see what the baby looks like

      Having tortured that analogy, I should probably point out I’m a bit of a Luddite with these things. This is not a sea change I look forward to, in any way, shape or form…