HP makes bold claims that AI can improve your life, but can they deliver on these claims?
HP hosted its HP Imagine 2024 event, which introduced new AI-based technologies and devices that will come to market later in 2024 and early 2025. While there was a lot of overlap in topics between this event and HP’s July 2024 event, there were also a few new surprises.
Two of those are the announcement of the OmniBook Ultra Flip, an impressive-looking and lightweight 2-in-1 AI laptop built for flexibility, and the EliteBook X, which is being touted as the “most powerful” AI PC with the “best AI performance,” as HP said in its presentation.
Other tools mentioned – both old and new – include HP Print AI, which will be linked to upcoming HP printers, Perfect Output (which helps with formatting prints), Cyberlink, HP Gen AI Lab, HP Wolf Securityand a new HP app that connects all your HP devices.
There was a common thread throughout the event: employees do not have a healthy relationship with their work. To prove this, HP conducted research into these claims, which presented via infographicsAccording to HP research, only 27% of employees are satisfied with their workplace.
The link here is that AI is key to a better relationship with work. For example, the number of people using AI has increased from 38% last year to 66% in 2024. People who have made the switch experience a huge increase in their job satisfaction, while those who don’t use it are less satisfied and more fearful of the technology.
People actually do better at their jobs with AI, as stated by The Work Relationship Index score for knowledge. Employees who use AI scored 11 points higher compared to non-AI users. These are points that HP has taken advantage of, which means that HP can make the most use of this.
It seems that HP is working to address many of these concerns by focusing more on how AI is a tool to collaborate with and assist with rather than a replacement for humans. The choice to be able to use AI locally is huge, as it means that HP and AI chatbot companies can’t train their models on your data. Safety, privacy, and security also seem to be major concerns for HP, and it’s addressing these with its malware defenses under the aforementioned Wolf Security that has been made available to consumers with its latest laptops.
There’s also HP Gen AI Lab, a feature that prevents “hallucinations” in AI datasets. Hallucinations are false or misleading information generated by an AI system that occurs when AI models make mistakes based on insufficient training data, incorrect assumptions, or biased data.
Another major concern is durability, or how much power the AI uses when it’s calculating a query. This topic hasn’t been discussed as much, but it was touched upon during a media briefing with several HP representatives. HP essentially believes that because the NPU is handling the bulk of the workload in AI usage, it’s reducing the power consumption of the GPU and CPU, making the laptops more energy efficient and durable.
It was also mentioned that many of these workstation companies already have strict power consumption standards, mainly due to restrictions on how much energy a warehouse can use. Of course, this doesn’t address the very real reality that despite these restrictions, AI is still depletion of natural resources at an alarming rate.
HP also stated that it aims to be 100% free of single-use plastics in its product packaging by 2025 and that it has used at least one billion tons of recycled ocean plastics, recycled fishing nets and used cooking oil to produce its products to date. When asked, HP said that its partners also undergo an onboarding process in which they must meet strict requirements to work with the company.
The most fascinating thing is that AI, as usual, is used interchangeably between tools that are useful in everyday life and evolutions, and the more recent generative AI that has become enormously popular and is much more controversial. While I would not accuse any company outright of malicious intent, and it is very clear that HP takes the lead in many of its claims and goals compared to its competitors, the fact that the definition of AI is often so confusing in these presentations is something notable.
However, it appears that HP is pursuing and has made significant gains on the various contentious issues in AI, including sustainability, security, dataset hallucinations, integrity, and everyday usability. Compared to other companies, there is a real and measured effort to ensure that its AI policies and practices are as ethical as possible (within the framework of capitalism), and such efforts have yielded tangible results.
As HP told me, “Our best is not good enough” when it comes to making real changes that affect the future of our world. That said, let’s hope that HP’s best efforts are good enough in a few years. Anything short of that could have serious consequences for all of us.
