Sean Hollister, reporting for The Verge:

This fall, Nvidia will officially become a consumer PC chipmaker like Intel, AMD, Apple, and Qualcomm, putting a complete computing chip — not just graphics — into the very heart of laptops and mini-PCs. After many months of leaks, it’s finally announcing the RTX Spark, the first in a family of chips that will meet or beat the most powerful thin-and-light Windows machines ever, it claims.

“This is the most efficient PC chip ever built,” says Nvidia senior director of product management Mark Aevermann — without sharing so much as a single statistic or chart to back that up.

The RTX Spark is effectively the same GB10 chip that’s in the DGX Spark, the tiny “personal AI supercomputer” that Nvidia released last year, only now it’s a family of chips instead of just one. The flagship version appears to be spec-to-spec identical with 20 CPU cores, 6,144 GPU cores, and 128GB of LPDDR5X memory.

I find this announcement deeply fascinating. Not only is it scant on useful details, but it’s chock full of superlatives. This processor is somehow the “most efficient PC chip ever built,” which is such an audacious claim I don’t even know where to begin. What is a PC chip in this context? What is efficiency? Heat, power, price, all three? Are Macs “PCs?” Is Nvidia challenging Apple silicon’s industry-leading performance per watt? Nvidia seems loath to share any information, so we should take this all with a huge grain of salt.

I’m only linking to this because it illustrates how far gone the artificial intelligence hype cycle is at this point in 2026. Here’s a real quote from Hollister:

Nvidia claims this adds up to “a new personal computing paradigm where AI is the UX” and “users no longer need to master complicated app UIs” because you’ll just talk to your PC instead of needing to use mouse and keyboard.

None of this is intelligible. “AI” is not a user experience; AI is a technology that a user experience can be built around. ChatGPT is the user interface behind the GPT-5.5 large language model. The experience of using that UI is the “user experience,” by definition. This is a nonsensical statement, but I’d love to know what Nvidia means. Does it mean that chatbot-style user interfaces will replace all graphical windows and applications? That we will no longer have webpages to look at and windows to click on, replaced by chat bubbles? Or maybe the chat bubbles are gone entirely and we just speak to the sky and hope someone hears us.

I’m only jesting, of course. This is inscrutable marketing. Nvidia, by far the largest benefactor of the AI boom, wants to inflate its stock by positioning its new processor as at the forefront of computing. It wants its shareholders to believe that any computer without this chip is destined to fail because people will no longer want to use their hands and eyes to navigate a computer operating system, and that the RTX Spark is the most efficient — or perhaps only possible — way to meet these demands. It’s just a preposterous assertion. Transparently nonsensical.

UIs being complicated does not mean anything other than bad UI designers and computer scientists were put in charge of designing and crafting that UI. A “complicated” UI is not itself an indictment of the graphical user interface paradigm. Instead of highlighting how Nvidia’s chips can run the most powerful LLMs and how they can aid designers and programmers to make amazing UIs that people will intuit in seconds, the marketing people have taken over without even a moment of consideration. People like scrolling social media. They like typing documents. They like playing video games. Has anyone who wrote this presentation ever used a computer?

The answer to that, of course, is yes. They’re some of the brightest technologists in the world. But they’re betting their audience isn’t. And they might just be right.