[jech]

It will probably depend on whether NPUs are universally available in smartphones, and whether we get a standard API for accessing NPUs. But I don't know whether AI-based codecs can have battery usage competitive with fixed-function hardware.

[hgoel]

Agreed, unless AI progress slows down enough that it becomes reasonable to bake weights into circuitry, the conventional approach will probably remain preferable for encoding, at least on power constrained devices.