Google is winning on every AI front

This article doesn't mention TPUs anywhere. I don't think it's obvious for people outside of google's ecosystem just how extraordinarily good the JAX + TPU ecosystem is. Google several structural advantages over other major players, but the largest one is that they roll their own compute solution which is actually very mature and competitive. TPUs are extremely good at both training and inference[1] especially at scale. Google's ability to tailor their mature hardware to exactly what they need gives them a massive leg up on competition. AI companies fundamentally have to answer the question "what can you do that no one else can?". Google's hardware advantage provides an actual answer to that question which can't be erased the next time someone drops a new model onto huggingface.

[1]https://blog.google/products/google-cloud/ironwood-tpu-age-o...

I've used Jax quite a bit and it's so much better than tf/pytorch.

Now for the life of me, I still haven't been able to understan what a TPU is. Is it Google's marketing term for a GPU? Or is it something different entirely?

TPUs (short for Tensor Processing Units) are Google’s custom AI accelerator hardware which are completely separate from GPUs. I remember that introduced them in 2015ish but I imagine that they’re really starting to pay off with Gemini.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor_Processing_Unit

Believe it or not, I'm also familiar with Wikipedia. It reads that they're optimized for low precisio high thruput. To me this sounds like a GPU with a specific optimization.