Survey shows most people wouldn't pay extra for AI-enhanced hardware | 84% of people said no

someone tried to sell me a fucking AI fridge the other day. Why the fuck would I want my fridge to "learn my habits?" I don't even like my phone "learning my habits!"

...just under 2,000 voters said "yes."

And those people probably work in some area related to LLMs.

It's practically a meme at this point:

Nobody:

Chip makers: People want us to add AI to our chips!

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.

There's really no point unless you work in specific fields that benefit from AI.

Meanwhile every large corpo tries to shove AI into every possible place they can. They'd introduce ChatGPT to your toilet seat if they could

One of our helpdesk told me about his amazing idea for our software the other day.

"We should integrate AI into it..."

"Right? And have it do what?"

"Uh, I don't know"

This from the same man who came up with an idea for orange juice pumped directly into your home, and you pay with crypto.

And the scary thing is, I can imaging these things coming out of the mouths of people in actual positions of power, where laughing at them might actually get people fired...

And what do the companies take away from this? "Cool, we just won't leave you any other options."

I would pay extra to make sure that there is no AI anywhere near my hardware.

I don't mind the hardware. It can be useful.

What I do mind is the software running on my PC sending all my personal information and screenshots and keystrokes to a corporation that will use all of it for profit to build user profile to send targeted advertisement and can potentially be used against me.

Any “ai” hardware you but today will be obsolete so fast it will make your dick bleed

AI for IT companies is looking more and more like 3D was for movie industry

All fanfare and overhype, a small handful of examples that do seem a solid step forward with millions others that are just a polished turd. Massive investment for something the market has not demanded

I would pay for a power efficient AI expansion card. So I can self host AI services easily without needing a 3000€ gpu that consumes 10 times more than the rest of my pc.

They want you to buy the hardware and pay for the additional energy costs so they can deliver clippy 2.0, the watching-you-wank-edition.

This is yet another dent in the “exponential growth AGI by 2028” argument i see popping up a lot. Despite what the likes of Kurzweil, Musk, etc would have you believe, AI is severely overhyped and will take decades to fully materialise.

You have to understand that most of what you read about is mainly if not all hype. AI, self driving cars, LLM’s, job automation, robots, etc are buzzwords that the media loves to talk about to generate clicks. But the reality is that all of this stuff is extremely hyped up, with not much substance behind it.

It’s no wonder that the vast majority of people hate AI. You only have to look at self driving cars being unable to handle fog and rain after decades of research, or dumb LLM’s (still dumb after all this time) to see why. The only real things that have progressed quickly since the 80s are cell phones, computers, etc. Electric cars, self driving cars, stem cells, AI, etc etc have all not progressed nearly as rapidly. And even the electronics stuff is slowing down soon due to the end of Moore’s Law.

No, but I would pay good money for a freely programmable FPGA coprocessor.

If the AI chip is implemented as one, and is useful for other things I'm sold.

Remember when the IoT was very new? There were similar grumblings of "Why would I want talk to my refridgerator?" And now more and more things are just IoT connected for no reason.

I suspect AI will follow as similar path into the consumer mainstream.

Why would I pay more for x company to have a robot half ass the work of all the employees they're gonna cut?

I still don’t understand how the buzzword of AI 10x’d all these valuations, when it’s always either: a) exactly what they’ve been doing before, now with a fancy new name b) deliberately shoehorning AI in, in ways with no practical benefit

I wouldn't even pay less.

That's kind of abstract. Like, nobody pays purely for hardware. They pay for the ability to run software.

The real question is, would you pay $N to run software package X?

Like, go back to 2000. If I say "would you pay $N for a parallel matrix math processing card", most people are going to say "no". If I say "would you pay $N to play Quake 2 at resolution X and fps Y and with nice smooth textures," then it's another story.

I paid $1k for a fast GPU so that I could run Stable Diffusion quickly. If you asked me "would you pay $1k for an AI-processing card" and I had no idea what software would use it, I'd probably say "no" too.

I have no clue why any anybody thought I would pay more for hardware if it goes with some stupid trend that will be blow up in our faces soon or later.

I don't get they AI hype, I see a lot of companies very excited, but I don't believe it can deliver even 30% of what people seem to think.

So no, definitely not paying extra. If I can, I will buy stuff without AI bullshit. And if I cannot, I will simply not upgrade for a couple of years since my current hardware is fine.

In a couple of years either the bubble is going to burst, or they really have put in the work to make AI do the things they claim it will.

I honestly have no Idea what AI does to a processor, and would therefore not pay extra for the badge.

If it provided a significant speed improvement or something, then yeah, sure. Nobody has really communicated to me what the benefit is. It all seems like hand waving.

Its bad enough they shove it on you in some websites. Really not interested in being their lab rats

84% said no.

16% punched the person asking them for suggesting such a practice. So they also said no. With their fist.

I agree that we shouldn't jump immediately to AI-enhancing it all. However, this survey is riddled with problems, from selection bias to external validity. Heck, even internal validity is a problem here! How does the survey account for social desirability bias, sunk cost fallacy, and anchoring bias? I'm so sorry if this sounds brutal or unfair, but I just hope to see less validity threats. I think I'd be less frustrated if the title could be something like "TechPowerUp survey shows 84% of 22,000 respondents don't want AI-enhanced hardware".

Depends on what kind of AI enhancement. If it's just more things nobody needs and solves no problem, it's a no brainer. But for computer graphics for example, DLSS is a feature people do appreciate, because it makes sense to apply AI there. Who doesn't want faster and perhaps better graphics by using AI rather than brute forcing it, which also saves on electricity costs.

But that isn't the kind of things most people on a survey would even think of since the benefit is readily apparent and doesn't even need to be explicitly sold as "AI". They're most likely thinking of the kind of products where the manufacturer put an "AI powered" sticker on it because their stakeholders told them it would increase their sales, or it allowed them to overstate the value of a product.

Of course people are going to reject white collar scams if they think that's what "AI enhanced" means. If legitimate use cases with clear advantages are produced, it will speak for itself and I don't think people would be opposed. But obviously, there are a lot more companies that want to ride the AI wave than there are legitimate uses cases, so there will be quite some snake oil being sold.

Permanently Deleted

30% of people will believe literally anything. 16% means even half of the deranged people aren't interested.

AI in Movies: "The only Logical solution, is the complete control/eradication of humanity."

AI in Real Life: "Dave, I see you only have beer, soda, and cheese in your fridge. I am concerned for your health. I can write you a reminder to purchase better food choices." Dave: "THESE AI ARE EVIL, I WILL NEVER SUBMIT TO YOUR POWER!"

I just want good voice to text that runs on my own phone offline

Most people have pretty decent ai hardware already in the form of a gpu.

Sure dedicated hardware might be more efficient for mobile devices, but that's already done better in the cloud.

People don't want the hardware if the software sucks.

Why would I need a GPU if the only games that exist to play on it are the equivalent of WildTangent malware games?

If AI matures into something that people actually like, you'll get a different answer here.

Personally I would choose a processor with AI capabilities over a processor without, but I would not pay more for it

Most people won't pay for it because a lot of AI stuff is done cloud side. Even stuff that could be done locally is done in the cloud a lot. If that wasn't possible, probably more people would wand the hardware. It makes more sense for corporations to invest in hardware.

I guarantee most this AI bullshit is nothing but a backdoor to harvest more user info, anyway.

It just doesn't really do anything useful from a layman point of view, besides being a TurboCyberQuantum buzzword.

I've apparently got AI hardware in my tablet, but as far as I'm aware, I've never/mostly never actually used it, nor had much of a use for it. Off the top of my head, I can't think of much that would make use of that kind of hardware, aside from some relatively technical software that is almost as happy running on a generic CPU. Opting for AI capabilities would be paying extra for something I'm not likely to ever make use of.

And the actual stuff that might make use of AI is pretty much abstracted out so far as to be invisible. Maybe the autocorrecting feature on my tablet keyboard is in fact powered by the AI hardware, but from the user perspective, nothing has really changed from the old pre-AI keyboard, other than some additions that could just be a matter of getting newer, more modern hardware/software updates, instead of any specific AI magic.

"enhanced"

People already aren't paying for them, nVidia's main source of income is industry use and not consumer parts, right now.

Can't help but think of it as a scheme to steal the consumers' compute time and offload AI training to their hardware...

AI enhanced anything is pointless when everything seems intended to separate you from your money.

this goes to show just how far the current grift has gone.

AI enhanced hardware? Jesus Fuck take all my money that's amazing.

Dedicated LLM chatbot hardware? Die in a fire for even suggesting this is AI.

They'll pay for it. When the tech companies decide, it's a thing to make money off & advertise it, all the good ants will buy, buy, buy and the rest of the time they will work, work, work for it.