> GPU's are interesting in that they are like tulips (a breakthrough in efficiency could render them basically worthless), but they literally have the worthless aspect built into them directly.

Don't tulips have the "worthless aspect" AKA end-of-life built in as well? They perish, after all!

> You will not be able to profitably run an LLM on a 5 year old GPU, as your competitors will be able to run inference at much higher efficiencies than you with modern chips and will undercut you on price.

If you're in the business of selling tokens, certainly. If you're in the business of something else, and use LLMs to speed a process up, do you care that the 1-day process now takes 2 hours on 5yo hardware and 1 hour on SOTA hardware?

The only businesses in trouble here are those in the business of selling tokens. Those businesses selling potatoes who use an LLM to streamline/shorten some business process aren't going to care.