It’s so ridiculous to see TPUs being compared to NVIDIA GPUs. IMO proprietary chips such as TPU had no future sure to the monopoly on the cloud services. There is no competition across the cloud services providers. The only way to access TPUs is through GCP. As the result nobody wants to use them regardless of the technology. This is the biggest fault of GCP. Further the road, the gap between NVIDIA GPUs and Google TPUs (call it „moat“ or CUDA) is going to grow.

The opposite situation is with AMD which are avoiding the mistakes of Google.

My hope though is that AMD doesn’t start to compete with cloud service providers, e.g. by introducing their own cloud.

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hiddencost 6 hours ago | parent [-]

TPUs will thrive regardless of public adoption; Google's internal demand for TPU is such that they could buy every TPU ever produced.

	▲	roughly 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		One thing worth note here - TPUs are optimized for a fairly constrained set of operations. Google’s had good success with them, but, like many of the other Google architectural choices, this will constrain Google’s technical choice space in the future - if they’ve gone all in on TPUs, future Google machine learning projects will be using the sets of operations the TPUs excel at because that’s what Google has a lot of, not necessarily because that’s the optimal choice. This will have knock-on effects across the industry due to Google’s significant influence on industry practice and technical direction.