MSI’s new OLED monitor has an NPU for built-in AI, please end my suffering

MSI has a new OLED gaming monitor. It’s 27 inches, 1440p, and pretty darn speedy (though not a record-breaker) at 500Hz. All good. It also has a built-in neural processing unit (or NPU). If you’re familiar with that term, you know what comes next: this OLED monitor has “AI” built into it. Confusticate and bebother.

After reading the official promo for the MSI MPG 271QR QD-OLED X50 and an extended session of bouncing various four-letter words off the walls of my office, I have to admit that this isn’t the worst way to jump on the “AI” bandwagon. The NPU is tied into a CMOS sensor (a very basic camera) and a presence detection system, which detects whether a real human is sitting in front of it. So it’ll turn itself off when you leave and wake back up when you come back, checking five times every second. It can even auto-dim the screen for the best local lighting, or just do so when you’re not actively facing the display.

All of that seems great, especially for those of us who are still wary of image burn-in on OLED panels. You might feel weird about a monitor with a camera built in that isn’t a webcam, but one of the advantages of putting that NPU on the monitor itself is that all the processing is done locally—it doesn’t connect to any external or remote system. “No images are saved or transmitted,” says MSI.

MSI

Okay, so… How is this not just a regular presence detection system, something that’s been available in high-end laptops, monitors, and other gadgets for years? And why does it need a fancy NPU instead of, well, just about any low-powered chip?

Well, MSI also says there are “AI” features in the monitor’s built-in menu system, and it can dynamically adjust settings for different games. But none of that requires anything approaching an NPU, and MSI doesn’t say that it’s tied into the NPU, either. I detect the hand of a branding manager who wanted to put “AI” all over the spec sheet, actual presence of artificial intelligence (even in its current and wholly misapplied nomenclature) be damned.

The rest of the monitor’s specs are nice, if not groundbreaking—it’s not like it includes a Wi-Fi antenna. It’s packing a USB-C port with up to 98 watts for playing nice with gaming laptops. You get support for HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2.1a, with up to 80 Gbps throughput. The monitor is Nvidia G-Sync compatible and fully supports variable refresh rates on consoles at up to 120 Hz. Sadly, according to VideoCardz, there’s no mention of a price or release date. I would expect it at the tail end of this year, or early 2026.