Intel to Develop Discrete GPUs, Hires AMD's Raja Koduri as Chief Architect
The connection between "AI" and "GPU" in everyone's mind is a testament to the PR chops of NVIDIA. You don't need a GPU to run ML/DL/neural networks, but NVIDIA have GPU tech so they're selling GPUs. What you need is the massive ALU power and, to lesser extent, the huge internal bandwidth of GPUs. There are huge chunks of GPU die area that are of no use when running NN-type of code: the increasingly complex rasterizers, the texture units, the framebuffer/zbuffer compression stuff, and on the software side, the huge pile of junk in the drivers that allows you not only to run games from a decade ago, but also run them better than last year's GPU. If you can afford to start from scratch, you can lose a lot of this baggage.