Computex 2026: Are We Heading for the Agentic PC Era Yet?

https://www.eetimes.com/computex-2026-are-we-heading-for-the-agentic-pc-era-yet/

by rbanffy • 2 months ago

32 38 2 months ago

devn0ll3• 2 months ago

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.

Well, at least for me: no thanks.

corv• 2 months ago

Less space than a nomad. Lame.

To be fair, I find the term to be as contrived as “performant”

tmaly• 2 months ago

I had to buy a new washing machine last year. It has an AI mode, what ever that is. I have never used the mode.

syberspace• 2 months ago

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

andai2• 2 months ago

On my walk today I passed an LG company van. It had an ad for one of their new AC units on the side. "AI Air"

forinti• 2 months ago

There's a billboard near my home with an ad for "AI designed glasses".

squid_ca• 2 months ago

Mine too. I think it's just a buzzword, like, this would have been called "Smart Wash" five years ago.

XorNot• 2 months ago

What you're not planning to upgrade from your Web 3.0 platform to an Agentic one?

Scandalous!

Closi2• 2 months ago

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.

Octoth0rpe2• 2 months ago

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.

devn0ll3• 2 months ago

similar to how quite a lot of the most technical users in the 80's thought GUI's were a waste of time

Well... They are! ;-) (It's a joke, but at the same time, I do see a terminal resurgence the past few years)

cromka3• 2 months ago

As much as I hate it, you and your opinion is exactly what Jobs always talked about: people don't need things until they realize they need them.

You not envisioning use for it is just a past bias. You can't know that. You can't because we haven't yet reached the point where the OS is fully useful when controlled with AI.

gedy• 2 months ago

But the industry types have been talking about "agents" for 30 years... This used to be a thing that "intelligent agents will go on the internet and gather information for you" then search engines came out and people were happy with that instead.

sublinear• 2 months ago

I'm sorry, but what was Steve Jobs ever uniquely right about except that we needed better touch screens on smartphones?

We don't see the same obvious applications of AI because nobody has developed a proper user interface for it. We're stuck with voice, chat, and dumping documents onto it. The current pro-AI stance is basically "fuck the user and fuck interfaces".

adrian_b• 2 months ago

The idea about various fads that "not envisioning use for it is just a past bias", is seldom true.

What people want has not changed for millennia and it is unlikely to change soon.

Most of the things that are useful have already been imagined millennia ago, even if at that time nobody had any idea about how one could develop any technology for building such things in reality. For instance in the Ancient Greek literature there are descriptions of artificial robots for doing the hard work, means for flying etc.

The past bias can block indeed one to envision the usefulness of some things, but only when those things are not a goal in themselves, but they are only intermediates for achieving things that are already known to be useful and the past bias prevents the user to realize that there exists an alternate path to the useful goals, instead of the known traditional path.

LLMs are indeed tools that can be used to achieved some useful goals, so in some cases a user may not realize how they can be used, due to past bias.

There is no doubt that there are a few applications for which LLMs are very useful, but for experienced people, even if they have never used LLMs yet, it is easy to recognize with certainty that some of the proposed applications for LLMs will never be useful for them.

For example, I would never use an LLM for searching the Web or for summarizing documents. What I recognize as important in a Web search or in a document differs too much from what typical humans would recognize, for an LLM to have any chance to generate equivalent results.

The only reason why I may find useful to put some questions to a big LLM is because it is likely that it may have had access during training to documents to which I do not have access. Thus the answer might provide some clues about other sources than those known to me. Instead of this, I would very much prefer to use a traditional search tool on the training set, but the LLM may be a poor substitute for its training set, which is better than nothing.

For now, the most lucrative application for LLMs is as coding assistants. Here there is no past bias, because since the earliest times of automatic computers, people have hoped for methods that would allow the generation of computer programs with minimum input from a human.

I do not think that there is anyone who would dispute that LLMs have allowed a much greater progress than before in this direction. Here what are frequently disputed are only the correct strategies of using LLMs for this purpose, because it is obvious that they are frequently misused and those who do not understand programming, like most managers, have completely unrealistic ideas about what can be done and what should be done with LLMs.

devn0ll3• 2 months ago

Do you use an adblocker? If so, how could you know that you do not need all those things they offer in the ads?

A bit tongue in cheek, I know, but a nice comparison I think. If the value is true, it will come to me soon enough without it needing to be pushed in my face every second (AI in notepad for instance, or via a completely unneeded extra keyboard button)

In fact, I see a great need for AI in medical science, security research. But not as a tool to "create art"... (Don't make me ~~puke~~ laugh.) Or as a replacement for human interaction with my insurance company.

georgeburdell• 2 months ago

Agentic for most people should mean an easy way to fix what were previously missing UI features. Hopefully companies are (with permission) paying attention to user prompts in aggregate to guide UX work

yogthos2• 2 months ago

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.

baron3dl2• 2 months ago

I think Apple's tech-heavy user base and vertically integrated hardware/network/software mega architecture positioned them perfectly to beat the rest of the market to 1st runner up. The competition knows, they just can't move that fast.

I started working on my own harness and also notice a significant improvement in model capability with it https://dirge-code.github.io

You should mine your session logs for examples of scenarios that demonstrate this improvement. If you can characterize it in a time series metric, like tokens/feature, as you applied improvements, then you're offering a receipt.

yogthos2• 2 months ago

Yeah, that's a good idea. I haven't really been rigorous with tracking the token usage metrics when I started. I was thinking I could compare solving tasks with opencode too and track metrics for both.

Henchman21• 2 months ago

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.

A post-apocalyptic hellscape, essentially.

andai2• 2 months ago

People living in the collapsed ruins of the past society

Kind of feels like I was already born into that.

baron3dl2• 2 months ago

is this not an essential human condition?

Avicebron• 2 months ago

As long as the models are local this doesn't seem that crazy. What concerns me is that these are "agentic PCs" that only work with a subscription.

Animats2• 2 months ago

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.

Mabusto• 2 months ago

As long as I can connect my 3D TV, I can't wait to sip some Juicero and watch Quibi on it.

Computex 2026: Are We Heading for the Agentic PC Era Yet?

Related Stories