Deep learning has already completely taken over speech recognition, face recognition, and object recognition. Going forward deep learning is the technology that will solve sensing and perception for machines. You're going to want sensing and perception in your phone and every computer you use, but even more than that: every drone, every self-driving car, every kind of robot is going to need multiple deep learning chips. Each of those chips is going to need vastly more FLOPS and more memory bandwidth than the biggest CPUs and GPUs of today.

Beyond sensing and perception, I believe that deep learning will also be the technology that solves planning, natural language, reasoning, and creativity for machines. This is much more speculative, but you can see the beginnings of planning in the DeepMind Atari work, the beginnings of natural language processing and reasoning in machine translation and various question answering systems, and the beginnings of creativity in Deep Dream and other generative models people have done. Of course once all those pieces are solved then AI is solved. The market for a technology that solves AI is practically unlimited.

Intel is constantly searching for the next big application that will require more processing power so people need to buy faster CPUs and they can justify spending $X billion on their next fab. In recent years they've been struggling to find it. Deep learning is it. The appetite for FLOPS and memory bandwidth is unbounded for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately for Intel, CPUs are weak on both compared to GPUs. Maybe Xeon Phi can morph into a deep learning system?

In the coming years we will see a lot more applications powered by deep learning. If someone releases a chip that provides 10x performance compared to the current GPU-based method, they will sell a lot of chips.

Basically everything you interact with on a daily basis involves (deep) machine learning. Everything from advertising to logistics to drug discovery to credit evaluations to packet routing on the internet either involves deep learning in its operation, or is presently implemented with some optimal strategy that was discovered via deep learning. Machine learning runs the world.

As for the business opportunity, if you are in one of these industries then one of the prime ways you differentiate from your competitors is how well your algorithm works. And how well it works depends a great deal on how much training data you are able to feed into it, which in this era of information saturation is basically a hardware limitation.

Give me a 10x more powerful machine learning system, and I'll give you a few basis points advantage over the competition, and that'll make you, not them, the dominant player.