People unwilling to pay a premium for AI-enhanced hardware: for good reason
New hardware offerings are increasingly focusing on AI capabilities, but only around seven percent of people said they would pay more for them, a recent TechPowerUp poll reveals.
The poll reveals that the majority, or 84.1%, of the 26,630 participants, most of whom are PC enthusiasts, would not pay more for hardware with AI capabilities. 8.6% were unsure, and 7.3% said “yes.”
Recently, Microsoft, Apple, and other tech companies have introduced new hardware options with enhanced AI capabilities, measured by new metrics such as TOPS, which stands for trillion operations per second. Processors, capable of running machine learning models on the device are marketed as being “neural processing units,” or NPUs.
Microsoft requires NPUs to be capable of 40 TOPS or higher for its Copilot+ functionality, and only the latest Apple MacBooks and iPhones will have “Apple Intelligence,” creating a small circle of “chosen ones.”
But why aren’t PC enthusiasts willing to pay more for those features? A few explained themselves on the TechPowerUp forum.
Running large language models requires exceptionally capable specialized hardware, consisting of hundreds of graphic processors in large data centers. Any AI software that can run locally would be limited in features.
People unwilling to pay a premium for AI-enhanced hardware: for good reason. Read more in🧵⤵️#AI #technology #gadgets
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Would you pay more for AI capabilities in new tech?
“All of the useful AI I've encountered so far is datacenter-hosted AI requiring hundreds of gigs or even terabytes of RAM for LLM datasets, hundreds of terabytes of fast storage for inference, and year(s) of training on multiple petabytes of datasets to become useful. The "local AI" software I've tried has been little more than a marketing gimmick that achieves little of value other than maybe some fun image manipulation that I can't really classify as AI,” one forum user said.
“For now, AI is a cloud product, and there's a massive, unbridgeable gap between it and what any local NPU can achieve.
Many expressed similar opinions – that there isn’t much value in paying more for a device that’s unable to complete a task that could be readily performed through cloud-based services.
