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I'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them.

Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.

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It's pretty interesting that consumer GPUs started to really be a thing in the early 90s and the first Bitcoin GPU miner was around 2011. That's only 20 years. That caused a GPU and asic gold rush. The major breakthroughs around LLMs started to snowball in the academic scene right around that time. It's been a crazy and relatively quick ride in the grand scheme of things. Even this silicone shortage will pass and we'll look back on this time as quaint.

Of course you are right, but in addition they wouldn't have even made them if GPUs hadn't made ML on CPU so relatively incapable. Competition drives a lot of these decisions, not just raw performance.

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