Newegg is the latest to capitalize on the ChatGPT hype by integrating the GPT model into its PC Builder tool. Sounds great — give it a query tailored to your purpose and get the desktop version, all with quick links to buy what you need. There’s just one problem — it’s terrible.
No, the Newegg AI PC Builder doesn’t just make a few weird recommendations. It’s still in beta and that’s to be expected. The problem is that the AI seems to actively ignore the prompts you give it, suggests weird and unbalanced PCs, and has a clear bias towards charging you more when you ask to spend less.
Grab a bag of crap
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The first and most urgent problem is the budget. The AI willfully ignores whatever budget you set. I asked him to build a computer under $1000 and he gave me an intermediate build with a price tag of $1380. Worse, I then asked him to build a computer under $2000 and he gave me one that cost $1270. What gives?
This behavior extends across any budget you give the AI. It’s not even consistent. If you were looking for a $500 computer, they’ll suggest a $1100 build in one iteration and $800 in another. Me and Digital Trends Computing editor Luke Larsen played a little game where we gave the AI exactly the same query at the same time, and each time we got completely different versions.
It’s hard to trust anything the AI suggests because it handles Newegg’s inventory like a bag of parts you can drop into a box. It’s easy to imagine some really interesting use cases for this — build me a gaming PC Counter-Strike Global Offensive under $800 — but the AI does such a poor job of even doing an accurate basic budget.
What’s sneaky about this is that the AI seems to be biased towards higher prices if you’re on a lower budget. In five runs, AI enabled builds that were 27.2% more expensive with a $500 budget and 32.4% more expensive with a $1,000 budget. What’s interesting is that it enabled a build that was 48% cheaper when provided with a $2000 budget.
That example I mentioned above was no coincidence; in four out of five runs, the AI suggested a build that was more expensive with a $1,000 budget versus a $2,000 budget.
Configuration problems
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It goes beyond the price. Once you start digging into the upgrade, there are serious configuration issues. Above you can see one of the upgrades he recommends for a sub $1000 gaming PC. It pairs a 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X with an RTX 3060 graphics card, then pairs that GPU with an 850W power supply (Nvidia only recommends a 550W power supply for the RTX 3060).
Here’s another one. I looked him up for a PC for Premiere Pro under $1200 and he recommended a Ryzen 5 5600X with an RTX 3070. The funny thing is that Premiere Pro and the gaming versions were about the same price, and if you were to trade them, d have a better computer in both cases.
I could go on with these examples. I was looking for it for an RTX 3080 gaming PC; he recommended building with an RTX 3070. I was looking for a computer with AMD’s 3D V-Cache, and he recommended three different versions with Intel processors. However, the worst example by far was when he suggested 32GB of DDR5 memory for the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X — which, for the record, does not support DDR5. He even said the build wouldn’t work, but recommended the list anyway.
Other AI tools already do a better job at this. Google Bard and Microsoft’s Bing Chat not only respected the budget I set, but also maximized that budget for my use case. For example, Bard offered a gaming PC that favored a higher GPU, something Newegg’s tool consistently failed to do.
When bad becomes harmful
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Newegg’s AI PC Builder is bad, but who cares? Bad PC-building advice is rife on the Internet anyway, even if Newegg is top online retailer of PC components. The problem isn’t just AI PC Builder. Newegg randomly uses AI throughout its service.
The press release in which Newegg announced the new AI tools also mentions using AI to modify website text, suggest product details and summaries, and make product recommendations. Newegg also uses artificial intelligence for customer service inquiries and to suggest marketing email subject lines to maximize open rates.
The irony in all of this is that Newegg’s vice president of application development, Lucy Huo, acknowledges the fact that Newegg’s audience understands new technology better than most: “Our customers are among the most tech-savvy population because they often assemble complex technology products,” Huo says. in a press release. To know this and still publish something as useless and blatantly wrong as AI PC Builder is beyond me.
Hopefully, it’s a cautionary tale about throwing AI at a problem and expecting amazing results — we’ve certainly seen how that can go wrong in the past. In its current form, Newegg’s use of ChatGPT does not improve the shopping experience. It actively makes it worse.
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Source: newstars.edu.vn