> Qualcomm chief Cristiano Amon went further, saying the PC industry was being reborn, with the AI PC the most important development since Microsoft’s Windows 9

> Qualcomm chief Cristiano Amon went further, saying the PC industry was being reborn, with the AI PC the most important development since Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system. I can see the potential for this to be a sea change. Everybody had to go buy a Windows 95 PC, it was that much better than Windows 3.1. Everybody had to go buy a computer with WiFi - it was a completely new capability for the vast majority of the computer population. AI PCs are IMO not yet to their Windows 95 moment. They are at like Windows 286, where they exist, they kind of do their thing, but they have not yet reached the industry-defining paradigm that means everybody has to have one yet. In the same way that the Humane AI Pin and friends could have just been android apps (which could have just been PWAs), the sorts of 'sidebar with some flavor of LLM here' integrations we are seeing are very preliminary. Chat-based LLM output is a new and amazing capability. I look forward to future applications for local-only LLMs, operating to easily ingest my local data and transform it (WinFS style files reborn, anybody?) in new and useful ways, that will be cool. Where we are right now is that we appear to be locking down computers to be desktop-shaped smartphones (ARM or pluton) rather than general purpose computers, and in exchange we get generative fill here and there, along with a more intrusive OS (Microsoft Recall, Edge 'copilot', every other non-github 'copilot') and otherwise feels kinda samey. Some company exists right now, today, that none of us has heard of before, and it is going to be the Macromedia of our day, using existing technical pieces (on-device NPUs, AI algos / techniques) to do something else completely new (Stability doing Image / audio generation is amazing) and unexpected, and that killer app will be what we all go get AI PCs for. Hopefully we won't have to give up general purpose computing (TPM, Intel Management Engine, and whatever play these companies make to force the AI to be aligned to their corporate values) in the process.