This is the same justification that was used to ship the (now almost entirely defunct) NPUs on Apple and Android devices alike.
The A18 iPhone chip has 15b transistors for the GPU and CPU; the Taalas ASIC has 53b transistors dedicated to inference alone. If it's anything like NPUs, almost all vendors will bypass the baked-in silicon to use GPU acceleration past a certain point. It makes much more sense to ship a CUDA-style flexible GPGPU architecture.
Why are you thinking about phones specifically? Most heavy users are on laptops and workstations. On smartphones there might be a few more innovations necessary (low latency AI computing on the edge?)