Seeing how we are responding to AI or the copilot button on pc's... I _dare_ to suggest this "Agentic era" is nothing more then wishful thinking. Not supported by any real wish or need on the consumer side.
> Seeing how we are responding to AI or the copilot button on pc's... I _dare_ to suggest this "Agentic era" is nothing more then wishful thinking
Depends who 'we' is - I've seen plenty of non-tech people in the real world begin to use ChatGPT as a primary information source rather than the web (rightfully or not!)
I suspect that 'we' might not be the true early adopters here, similar to how quite a lot of the most technical users in the 80's thought GUI's were a waste of time.
> Depends who 'we' is - I've seen plenty of non-tech people in the real world begin to use ChatGPT as a primary information source rather than the web (rightfully or not!)
I don't think that's really what people are talking about when they talk about 'agentic' PCs.
as far as I've understood the AI mode on my new-ish washing machine: it's just a renamed "automatic" mode that uses a sensor to measure how heavy the load is and adjusts the cycle length. there is absolutely no AI involved, just an if-statement or equivalent logic gates. I'd guess yours does something similar
Washers now do have useful control systems. Mine starts out by spinning the tub a little, before adding water, to measure the load. Out of balance problems are a thing of the past - that's sensed and dealt with automatically. It's able to handle bed comforters or sneakers without problems. But it's not "AI", and it doesn't have a network connection.
I think in some people's minds, the concept of sentience and intelligence are intertwined, and there are at least some people (myself included) who do not think they're the same. There is a strong (but surprisingly not universal) consensus that LLMs are not sentient, so if you insist that sentience/intelligence are the same thing, then LLMs don't qualify as AI either. If you think the two concepts are separable, then they're intelligent but not sentient. The devil is of course in the definitions.
The "agentic PC" for consumers probably would be something you talk to, and would look like Alexa or a living room TV or glasshole glasses. Something other than a keyboard and screen combo.
Given that we’re making ourselves dumber through AI, education funding cuts, social media, and foolish propaganda AND the population is shrinking and everyone is seemingly depressed:
The most likely outcome is the world in the children’s cartoon “Thundarr the Barbarian”. People living in the collapsed ruins of the past society, belief in magic, etc.
I think it's almost certain that we'll be moving to running local models as a default in a few years. The quality of small models has been improving at an astonishing rate in my opinion. My favorite example is how Qwen3.6-27B that you can run on a laptop outperforms Qwen3.5-397B which was a flagship model requiring a commercial grade server that was released just in February. https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.6-27b
I fully expect that local models models that are comparable to current frontier models in performance will appear in the near future. Additionally, a lot more can be done with the harness as well, which in my opinion is an under-explored territory right now. For example, ATLAS does some clever tricks in this area https://github.com/itigges22/ATLAS
I started working on my own harness and also notice a significant improvement in model capability with it https://dirge-code.github.io
Apple seems to be one of the few companies to have realized that the future is likely local, and they've been focusing on optimizing hardware for that while everybody else seems to still be stuck in a model as a service paradigm.
Well, at least for me: no thanks.
Depends who 'we' is - I've seen plenty of non-tech people in the real world begin to use ChatGPT as a primary information source rather than the web (rightfully or not!)
I suspect that 'we' might not be the true early adopters here, similar to how quite a lot of the most technical users in the 80's thought GUI's were a waste of time.
I don't think that's really what people are talking about when they talk about 'agentic' PCs.
But for marketing, “artificial intelligence” is fine. And better than LLMs being called “AI”
To be fair, I find the term to be as contrived as “performant”
Scandalous!
The most likely outcome is the world in the children’s cartoon “Thundarr the Barbarian”. People living in the collapsed ruins of the past society, belief in magic, etc.
A post-apocalyptic hellscape, essentially.
Kind of feels like I was already born into that.
I fully expect that local models models that are comparable to current frontier models in performance will appear in the near future. Additionally, a lot more can be done with the harness as well, which in my opinion is an under-explored territory right now. For example, ATLAS does some clever tricks in this area https://github.com/itigges22/ATLAS
I started working on my own harness and also notice a significant improvement in model capability with it https://dirge-code.github.io
Apple seems to be one of the few companies to have realized that the future is likely local, and they've been focusing on optimizing hardware for that while everybody else seems to still be stuck in a model as a service paradigm.