I really hope one of the AI startups (stealth or already public) gets some more traction, especially among smaller scale hardware. Nvidia is an AI tyrant.
But I guess we are probably stuck with Intel/AMD/Apple... because who else is going to make affordable PCIe desktop cards, much less squeeze into laptops?
Within the next five years or so there will be a completely new hardware paradigm based on something like "crossbar arrays" or memristors that is orders of magnitude more efficient for ML tasks. This provides an opportunity for new startups. They will eventually probably be acquired by Nvidia, Intel or AMD though.
This is my take on it too. Any technology that significantly reduces the cost of running AI is of immediate value to any company performing a lot of AI simulations currently.
I nearly pulled my hair out trying to get a Stable Diffusion UI running on Graphcore's free POD4 instances, and... gave up after I couldnt even download their SDK to update it. Even though its theoretically extremely fast.
But I guess we are probably stuck with Intel/AMD/Apple... because who else is going to make affordable PCIe desktop cards, much less squeeze into laptops?