Does the rise of the NPU spell the beginning of the end for discrete GPUs?

GPU.

I was recently writing my MSI Prestige A16 AI+ review, and it got me thinking about the future of laptops. My drifting off had absolutely nothing to do with the quality of MSI's latest offering; I did give it a solid 4 stars after all, but was rather a result of the huge upsurge we've seen in AI-branded laptops.

In the last 18 months, I've lost track of the number of AI laptops we've tested, and it shows no signs of slowing down. As a result, I've been questioning if high-end creatives are going to need discrete GPUs in the future or if CPUs and Neural Processing Units (NPUs) will begin to dominate the landscape.