ASRock wants to bring AI software to the PC masses with new app, but limits access to its own RX 7000 GPUs

ASRock is trying to make artificial intelligence easier and more accessible for PC users with its AI QuickSet app. At its heart, AI Quickset simplifies the download and installation process for many AI programs. The company says its brand-new app should help popularize AI, but considering you need an ASRock RX 7000 series GPU to use AI QuickSet, that might be a bit challenging.

How AI QuickSet works is pretty simple; it's sort of like Steam but for AI software. All AI QuickSet does is offer a central place to obtain AI apps and install them with minimal manual input. It's nothing particularly fancy, but at the same time, it could be a big deal. A program that's easy to install is a program that has a low barrier of entry, which would indeed help with popularization.

That ASRock would only let you use AI QuickSet on its own graphics cards is understandable, but the company only makes AMD and Intel GPUs and only allows AI QuickSet on its Radeon RX 7000 series cards. That's an arbitrary cut-off point, though ASRock specifically points out the enhanced AI capabilities of RDNA 3 and the RX 7000 series cards that it powers.

Still, RX 6000 and Arc Alchemist owners probably would have still enjoyed AI QuickSet even if the performance is worse. In addition, limiting AI QuickSet to the small slice of PC users who own one of ASRock's RX 7000 series cards will probably hinder the company's mission to make AI popular.

This new app comes on the back of AMD's push into AI for consumer hardware. Beyond RDNA 3 having innately better hardware for AI, the company recently released a driver update that improves AI and machine learning performance in apps like Stable Diffusion and Adobe Lightroom.