I don't think this is too bad, since we care much more about prototyping at this stage. If some particular AI approach/architecture becomes 'good enough' for ma

I don't think this is too bad, since we care much more about prototyping at this stage. If some particular AI approach/architecture becomes 'good enough' for many applications, it wouldn't be long until ASICs for that calculation would arrive; probably not as good as the brain, but certainly orders of magnitude better than general-purpose CPUs/GPUs. There's also ongoing work involving ML with low-precision floats, etc. which can make such circuitry even more efficient. The reason we don't really see this today is that recouping the investment for designing and fabbing such ASICs may take a few years, and they would probably be obsolete by then, given today's rapid changes. For example, a few years ago there might have been a clear business proposition for putting ASICs dedicated to convolutional neural networks into cameras (even camera phones); yet CNNs now seem to be phasing out in favour of transformers; and it's not at all clear what the "best" transformer is yet (e.g. look at all the different approaches to making them O(n) memory!)