The TPU is not for you, it’s for tech companies to surveil, train, and exfiltrate your data at every level of the stack from hardware to application in a “secure” fashion. The “features” they proscribe feel forced because they are - they exist to make it seem like you’re getting the next new thing, when really the features that you actually want (like an ad-free experience and a local Windows account) have been so enshitified to hell that they functionally no longer exist.
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The hardware manufacturer gets to sell you extra hardware you don’t want.
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The OS vendor gets to run classification on all of your pictures, documents, and software.
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The browser vendor gets to see every site you visit and when, every product you buy, and every porn site you watch.
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Then, it all gets trained into a personal model that is cryptographically tied to your hardware and identity that can be queried at any time by tech companies, data brokers, advertisers, and law enforcement.
What YOU get is to ask a finders-fee-biased chatbot which product to buy, maybe some shitty mental health care, and a sycophantic buddy to patronize your ego. AI is the ultimate surveillance and advertising device.
Yeah, any AI with that much visibility into my life needs to be a locally run and personally controlled AI.
But frankly as much as I might like that for myself, I don’t want it because then it’ll be baked into work computers with the same set of circumstances except now you have to placate an AI for career advancement.
On the other hand, I just had an amazing idea for a n AI-powered USB device which emulates a keyboard but just does random SRS BIZNESS tasks like 16 hours a day. It’ll find articles on the internet and graph all the numbers (even page numbers) in a spreadsheet. It’ll create PowerPoints out of YouTube videos. It’ll draft marketing materials and email them to random internet addresses. You’ll be president of the company by the end of the month if AI has anything to say about it!
The OS vendor gets to run classification on all of your pictures, documents, and software.
Not on Linux
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Thank fucking God.
And so it begins?
On a related note, TIL AMD has an evolving competitor to Apple Silicon, except they named it “Ryzen AI” so everyone could ignore it. They apparently announced a couple new chips this week, and if it weren’t for a cgchannel article mentioning it in connection with Blender, video editing, etc., it never would’ve registered in my brain that the SoCs have GPU cores as well and might be useful for something. Still RDNA 3.x, so meh, but I’m looking forward a future SoC with RDNA 5 that supposedly has drastically improved RTX cores on par with Nvidia to use in a render farm at some point. They’re definitely not going to beat Nvidia if they keep using stupid names for their chips, though. NPU cores are useful for some things, but a SoC with the full gamut is the way to go.
Enterprise has spoken
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Almost nobody takes advantage of all the AI features they offer, Dell realized this
Do NPUs/TPUs even work with ComfyUI? That’s the only “AI PC” I’m interested in.
NPUs yes, TPUs no (or not yet). Rumour has it that Hailo is meant to be releasing a plug in NPU “soon” that accelerates LLM.
