I'm really disturbed by all of this - it doesn't quite check out with my that there are some quite capable players with kagillions of dollars who haven't managed to, or more disturbingly, won't even put up the investment nor effort to break into the AI shenanigans space within the GPU market.

I don't think you understand just how insanely difficult it is to break into that market. There's a lot that goes into GPU's that makes it a very difficult industry to get going in. Even with apple money or something like that, it's a losing prospect because in the time it'll take you to get up and off the ground (which is FOREVER) your competition will crush you.

You're right, I have no clue nor have I ever tried myself.

> Even with apple money or something like that, it's a losing prospect because in the time it'll take you to get up and off the ground (which is FOREVER) your competition will crush you.

This I find hard to believe, do you have a source or reference for that claim? Companies with that amount of cash are hardly going to be crushed by competition be it direct or indirect. Anyway, I'm talking more about the Intels and AMDs of this world.

We have very lacklustre efforts from players I won't name with their Zluda library (https://github.com/vosen/ZLUDA) which I got REALLY excited about, until I read the README.txt. Four contributors, last commit early 2021.

Why, oh why, is it this bad?