Will The Harmonic Convergence Of HPC And AI Last?

History and economics – as if you could separate the two – are burgeoning with examples of products being developed for one task and then being used, perhaps after some tweaking, for an entirely new and usually unexpected task. History is also full of stories of technologies aimed squarely at a task that, for one reason or another, miss the mark even if it looks like they were right on target. Product substitution as a means of lowering costs and thereby making a technology more prevalent is one of the primary reasons that economies exist. Some people make money in the transformation, and others lose out, but the overall economy improves from the efficiency engendered in that change. So it is a net good, and if done right, there is some money left over to invest in something else entirely. Every once in a while, you get a product substitution working from two different angles, and you can get a whole bunch of different things converging on a technology.