You know what could really use a dose of “AI”? Your BIOS.
aiBIOS leverages an LLM to integrate AI capabilities into Insyde Software’s flagship firmware solution, InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS. It provides the ability to interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle for PC users that require or desire changes to their BIOS Setup for their personal computers but do not fully understand the meaning of the settings available to them.
↫ Insyde press release
Google told users to put glue on pizzas and eat rocks, so I’m sure the combined efforts of a BIOS maker will surely not pose any problems when automatically changing BIOS settings based on the requests of users who do not really understand what they’re doing. This surely is a recipe for success, and I can’t wait to tell my BIOS to enable XMP, only for it to disable hyperthreading, change the boot order to only allow booting from the non-existent floppy drive, and to force the use of the integrated GPU when I’m actually using a dedicated one.
This is going to be just fine.
I think the requests will be more like “enable the best settings! “, and since there are no universal best settings all hell will break loose.
User: Make my computer faster!
BIOS: Okay, enabling overclocking at max settings.
*BOOM*
I get the need to improve the bios, but I don’t think AI is the right solution here. There’s a lot of room to improve BIOS settings so that they can be understood by users without going all in on AI to make changes.
IMHO too many bios vendors have been focusing on things that don’t matter, like fancy GUI interfaces, which I doubt many users care about. To the extent that vendors are bored and have nothing else to differentiate their BIOS, then whatever. But unfortunately it seems they are guilty of spending resources on these extraneous features when they still haven’t gotten the basics right. Too often bios vendors just dumb things down with inadequate explanations of what a feature actually does. The documentation deficiency impedes the bios experience more than the lack of features like GUIs and AIs. When online help and offline documentation are so ambiguous and poorly documented that even technical users are left in the dark, that’s a serious disservice to all bios users. This is one of my major pet peeves. When I do professional work I take pride in writing good documentation (verbose=1). Unfortunately very few products live up to documentation standards I deem acceptable.
So not only do I think AI is excessive for this use case, it risks further alienating user knowledge behind more layers of complexity and the result is likely to be even more difficult to troubleshoot and understand what’s going on.
+1
Any bios can be made much much much better by simply explaining what EIST or ring ratio means. But instead, we’re getting another AI-infused press release. Peculiar times we live in. Truly peculiar.
It feels like the old times of adding “whatever the trendy technology is” to their products.
We had skeuomorphic designs, blockchains, dot-com era, flash/blink/sound on web pages.
While all these fads pass, only some of the technology and products survive (like Amazon, or HTML5 which actually had good ideas).
It is no secret I am a proponent of AI. However this is one place LLMs really make no sense at all.
BIOS should either be left alone, or modified with specific instructions in mind. Just randomly trying settings would cause system slowdown at best, instability in general, and actual hardware failure and monetary damage in the worst case.
However something like “semantic search” that would find relevant help articles on a topic? That might be useful.
For example:
– “How can I enable best performance with two x16 GPUs?”
+ “Here are two related articles from our QA database on the subject”
In order for this to work at all, there would need to be accurate and thorough text descriptions of every option in the bios, and the bios would need to expose all its options (and be relatively standardized, and have all the options – which they don’t). Everything I just listed would already make most bioses about 100 times easier to use. But actually – yeah, if it had that, then an faked intelligence (better than artificial intelligence, since no one knows what that phrase means) to be able to chat against inside the bios, could be quite helpful. LLMs (which is what most people mean by AI in the current hype bubble) are very very good at natural language processing. It’s not worth it to argue against that – they are good at it, and in a place where you might want to chat with a bot (and EVERY use of these things starts with a bot interface), they can be quite helpful. Do we want to add this kind of overhead in a system like a bios? Probably not – but it’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard.
Honestly, these are mostly terms problems – we should really be saying “we are adding a natural language interface to our [insert product]”. But the hype bubble demands the use of the letters “AI” specifically in that order…
Time to dust off the old broadwell Xeon workstation. It’s got low IPC, but I’m not too worried about it rising up and overthrowing my household.
Technologically, How can that fit with the small foorpirrint of the ROM for the BIOS? Or will the machine be constrained to be latched to the cloud or internet? I sense this is another excuse to lease your property under the guise of Ai.
This is very frighten tbh
Solution in search of a problem.
friedchicken,
This seems to be the consensus even for those of us who believe in AI’s potential, haha.
By coincidence I’ve had to deal with a few BIOS issues over the past week on gigabyte and MSI botherboards…ugh. I’ve already mentioned above that AI isn’t the solution. But there are real problems and I wish they would solve them. I touched on some of it above, but here’s a more compressive list…
1) Nothing is properly documented. The “help” is typically 100% useless. It almost seems to be written by somebody who’s job was to write something but who had no idea what the function did. So we end up with help like this “Setting XYZ enables or disables XYZ”. WTF guys?!? At least hire someone who knows what the function does and document it properly. Garbage help/documentation is useless to 100% of people reading it and wastes everyone’s time. Unfortunately this is all too common.
2) Settings frequently lost (ie after updates). I understand that the binary structure that saves settings may not match between builds, and that’s the motivation for resetting it. But they really should fix it. I’m so annoyed at having to reprogram fan curves over and over again, it’s a lot of work. Gigabyte has a feature to save and restore these fan curves across updates. “Great” I thought. So I used it, but it didn’t even work, After an update the “saved” fan profiles got wiped out. I had to reset these along with all the other settings the bios deleted.
One of my systems the GPU was mounted flat with the motherboard rather than perpendicular to it, and it used a PCI gen3 extender cable to do this. This configuration worked fine but every single time the BIOS reset it would reset the PCI slot from gen3->gen4 and I no longer had video. I’d have to physically take the computer out from under the desk, disassemble the case, remove the GPU and place the GPU in the slot without the extender cable, boot into the bios to switch the slot back to PCIv3 mode, reinstall all the hardware normally and everything goes back to working…but I got so sick doing this. I ended up buying a far more expensive PCIv4 extender to replace the one that came with the case.
3) Settings that cause side effects elsewhere in the BIOS without cluing the user in. This got me into a pickle the other day. I’d enable CSM (the UI doesn’t say what this means or does BTW), and some other UEFI screens disappeared. No matter what I did I could not boot my USB boot disks (ie to run memtest) due to secure boot errors, but there were no settings for it in the BIOS until I reenabled a UEFI setting (that I hadn’t disabled) and only then could I disable secure boot and then renable CSM. Fortunately I had some ideas of what to look for but if I were a normal user I’d be totally stuck.
4) Boot loops. These are obviously caused by errors which aren’t necessarily the vendor’s fault, however the way they deal with errors makes it so hard to diagnose real problems. For example if an DDR overclock setting doesn’t work, you might end up with the bios clearing itself, and you may have to start over from scratch. I just wish the whole process were more elegant.
5) Out of spec defaults. I tend to leave BIOS performance parameters at their defaults – I buy the performance I need and I don’t overclock… But now many bios vendors are guilty of factory overclocks. I noticed the CPU voltages on my MSI motherboard seemed high and I investigated it. Turns out MSI does not run the CPU to manufacturer spec by default and custom settings are needed to do so. They’re taking risks with my hardware without my permission. Apparently this is common across vendors and most users don’t even know it’s happening. Unacceptable and IMHO this one is frankly lawsuit worthy. The defaults need to be in spec!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/intel-issues-statement-about-cpu-crashes-blames-motherboard-makers