> the reality is that AI would change everything we do

Your true believer convictions don't matter here. Those AI accelerators are merely just marketing stunts. They won't help your local inference because they are not general purpose enough for that, they are too weak to be impactful, most people won't ever run local inference because it sucks and is a resource hog most can't afford, and it goes against the interests of those scammy unprofitable corporations who are selling us LLMs as AI as the silver bullet to every problem and got us there in the first place (they are already successful in that, by making computing unaffordable). There's little to no economical and functional meaning to those NPUs.

For some people maybe. I don't want to use local AI and NPU will be dead weight for me. Can't imagine a single task in my workflow that would benefit from AI.

It's similar to performance/effiency cores. I don't need power efficiency and I'd actually buy CPU that doesn't make that distinction.

I am bullish on AI being used in all sorts of useful and discreet and non-discreet ways in the present and future. However I am exceedingly skeptical of NPUs being some winning bet.

No one is running LLMs on current gen NPUs so if we will in the future its a long time coming. Unless they can demonstrate some real (and not marketing) wins I remain skeptical that a large NPU for LLMs is the future.

I can totally see NPU accelerating simple tasks, but to be worth the silicon they have a ways to go imo.

99% of people don't need or want a dev workstation. My travel laptop is 7+ years old and I couldn't tell you the difference between it and a current flagship in terms of browsing and everyday tasks.

I will not lie, I find LLMs useful but the desktop experience is pretty polished already. NPUs seem to be an attempt to ride the AI bandwagon with very little to show for it so far.

Your comment is almost completely irrelevant to what the parent is saying. "AI would change everything we do" has nothing to do with "This new chip along with bloat from Windows enables new workflows for you". If you have been paying attention, you'd know that NPUs from these new CPUs barely made any difference from a consumer's perspective.

I see a lot of people put so much stock in a future of local models, but I am not convinced we’re on track for a world where most people are running local models. Especially when you have companies like Microsoft explicitly trying to make a world people don’t even own their software/hardware anymore and do everything on the cloud.

This is irrelevant when the question is whether marketing your CPU with "AI" will help sales.

Toilets also changed everything we do and are helpful in unobtrusive ways, but that won't make the "Ryzen Crapper" a customer favorite.

So I’ve got a lot warmer to believing that AI can be a better programmer than most programmers these days. That is a low bar :). The current approach to AI can definitely change how effective a programmer is: but then it is up to the market to decide if we need so many programmers. The talk about how each company is going to keep all the existing programmers and just expect productivity multipliers is just what execs are currently telling programmers; that might change when the same is execs are talking to shareholders etc.

But does this extrapolate to the current way of doing AI being in normal life in a good way that ends up being popular? The way Microsoft etc is trying to put AI in everything is kinda saying no it isn’t actually what users want.

I’d like voice control in my PC or phone. That’s a use for these NPUs. But I imagine it is like AR- what we all want until it arrives and it’s meh.