> I shouldn't be paying more for my next CPU because it has a NPU that I won't ever use. Give me the freedom of choice.

There is a plenty to choose from.

> - NPUs may not be completely stupid as a concept, in theory, but at this point in time they are proprietary black-boxes purpose-built for marketing and micro-benchmarks. Give me something more general-purpose and open, and I will change my mind

In fact the linked article is not talking about NPUs in particular, but about Ryzen AI cpus. These have unified memory and more compute compared to normal ones which make them very useful for inference.

> how large do you think a LLM needs to be so it's deemed useful by your average laptop user?

Depend what they need it for. Useful autcomplete in IDE starts at around 4b weights.

> loading it in memory

Happens only once, usually takes around 10sec.

> roundtrip times

Negligible? it is loca after all.

> And how often would the user realistically want to suffer

No suffering involved.