Nowadays, all laptops come with NPU processors for AI purposes, but AI still does nothing useful, while the chips only take up space and waste energy.

The new wave of CoPilot Plus PCs are great. Powered by Qualcomm’s ARM chips, they finally bring Windows PCs into the same league as Apple Silicon Macs in terms of power, efficiency, and battery life. But they also compromise this newfound performance by wasting space on dedicated AI chips that — let’s face it — no one really knows what to do with.

“While there have been many advances in AI technology in recent years, there are still a lot of issues that need to be solved, and many people are still wary of it,” Edward Tian, CEO of AI discovery site GPTZero, told Lifewire via email. “Even those who aren’t are often unsure about where or how to use AI. I imagine AI will eventually flourish in a cloud-based structure as well, while on-device AI could prove more valuable to businesses than individual users on their personal devices.”

An NPU (neural processing unit) is a silicon specifically designed to perform the kinds of operations that AI-like functions require. All of these things can be done on a regular computer CPU, but much more slowly. It’s the same idea as using a GPU to do graphics processing or to perform many parallel mathematical operations. Specialized chips are not only faster, they also use less power than taxing the CPU to do a task it’s not so good at.