> Can't imagine a single task in my workflow that would benefit from AI.

You don't do anything involving realtime image, video, or sound processing? You don't want ML-powered denoising and other enhancements for your webcam, live captions/transcription for video, OCR allowing you to select and copy text out of any image, object and face recognition for your photo library enabling semantic search? I can agree that local LLMs aren't for everybody—especially the kind of models you can fit on a consumer machine that isn't very high-end—but NPUs aren't really meant for LLMs, anyways, and there are still other kinds of ML tasks.

> 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.

Do you insist that your CPU cores must be completely homogeneous? AMD, Intel, Qualcomm and Apple are all making at least some processors where the smaller CPU cores aren't optimized for power efficiency so much as maximizing total multi-core throughput with the available die area. It's a pretty straightforward consequence of Amdahl's Law that only a few of your CPU cores need the absolute highest single-thread performance, and if you have the option of replacing the rest with a significantly larger number of smaller cores that individually have most of the performance of the larger cores, you'll come out ahead.

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Telaneo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> You don't do anything involving realtime image, video, or sound processing?

Nothing that's not already hardware accelerated by the GPU or trivial to do on CPU.

> You don't want ML-powered denoising and other enhancements for your webcam

Not really.

> live captions/transcription for video

Not really, since they're always bad. Maybe if it's really good, but I haven't seen that yet.

> OCR allowing you to select and copy text out of any image

Yet to see this implemented well, but it would be a nice QOL feature, but not one I'd care all that much about being absent.

> object and face recognition for your photo library enabling semantic search?

Maybe for my old vacation photos, but that's a solid 'eh'. Nice to have, wouldn't care if it wasn't there.

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throwa356262 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Is everyone a content creator these days?

Besides, most of what you mentioned doesn't run on NPU anyway. They are usually standard GPU workload.

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wtallis 4 hours ago | parent [-]

None of what I listed was in any way specific to "content creators". They're not the only ones who participate in video calls or take photos.

And on the platforms that have a NPU with a usable programming model and good vendor support, the NPU absolutely does get used for those tasks. More fragmented platforms like Windows PCs are least likely to make good use of their NPUs, but it's still common to see laptop OEMs shipping the right software components to get some of those tasks running on the NPU. (And Microsoft does still seem to want to promote that; their AI PC branding efforts aren't pure marketing BS.)

	▲	anematode 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The issue is that the consumer strongly associates "AI" with LLMs specifically. The fact that machine learning is used to blur your background in a video call, for example, is irrelevant to the consumer and isn't thought of as AI.