A podcast I listen to posted an interview with an expert last week saying that he perceived that much of the interest in custom hardware for machine learning tasks died when people realized how effective GPUs were at the (still-evolving-set-of) tasks.

http://www.thetalkingmachines.com/blog/2016/5/5/sparse-codin...

I wonder how general the gains from these ASIC's are and whether the performance/power efficiency wins will keep up with the pace of software/algorithm-du-jour advancements.