Yes, but I'm not interested in those sorts of uses. I'm wondering what else an NPU could be used for. I don't know what an NPU actually is at a technical level, so I'm ignorant of the possibilities.
As to why, I think it's along the lines of this: the CPU does 100 things, one of those is AI acceleration. Let's take the AI acceleration and give it its own space instead so we can keep the power down a bit, add some specialization, and leave the CPU to do other stuff.
Again, I'm coming at this from a high-level as if explaining it to my ageing parents.