Lenovo put an AI chip in a monitor, for some reason

AI is in everything! It’s in your phone, it’s in your car, it’s in your pico-projecting broach — wait, not that one. But now it’s also in your monitor, or at least Lenovo thinks it might be soon. The company stuck an NPU chip into a display to give it AI abilities. Why? Allegedly, to power non-AI-enabled PCs and also to make the display more ergonomic. Sure.

According to the MWC press release, the AI Display can use its discrete NPU to “empower non-AI PCs with AI computing power,” giving them access to local large language models (LLMs) among other goodies. And the display can also automatically rotate, elevate, and tilt based on the user’s movements… something that basic eye and movement tracking could do long before “AI” in the current sense was a thing.

Why not just throw in some small electric motors? You know, the same sort of thing security cameras have had for a long time. In fact, the preview image shows a pop-up sensor bar, which presumably has a camera and/or IR tracker inside of it for exactly that purpose. Why would you need AI for that basic functionality?

And as someone who uses a monitor like this all day every day, at a standing desk where I’m often moving around, I can’t see the appeal in having the screen follow me around. I’m used to focusing on text or video while my head moves slightly, as I would assume everyone is. I’m far less used to seeing the reverse.

I also can’t imagine that having a discrete NPU in a monitor is all that useful. If you’re buying a display this fancy, odds are pretty good that you’re not plugging it into a PC (or any other device) that’s so old that it can’t handle LLMs and other fancy AI tech on its own.

That said, this is a “proof of concept” device, so excess scrutiny on Lenovo’s design team isn’t really fair or necessary. And Lenovo has a history of getting a little wacky with its hardware — more outlandish designs have made it onto store shelves, like the ThinkBook laptop with an ultrawide screen and a tablet display embedded in the palmrest.

But I doubt this will be the last time we see “AI” thrown into a gadget just for the sake of having it in a gadget. Everything from iPhones to refrigerators are suffering under this trend, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before monitors got the same treatment.