> Today’s AI runs on GPUs — chips built for rendering video games, not thinking machines. Adapting them for AI is about as sensible as adapting a boat to travel across land.

A GPU is fundamentally just a chip for matrix operations, and that's good for graphics but also for "thinking machines" as we currently have them. I don't think it's like a boat traveling on land at all.

Another definition: A modern GPU a general purpose computer that can make parallelized and efficient computations. It's optimized to run limited number of operations but on large number of data points.

This happens to be useful both for graphics (same "program" running on on huge number of pixels/vertices) and neural networks (same neural operations on huge number of inputs/activations)