Only

Most CPUs can only practically handle tens of billions of arithmetic operations per second

This was a ’take a step back for a moment’ line to read.

Also, a densely informative paragraph:

One of the things I learned while unsuccessfully trying to sell to businesses during my startup career was that it was much easier to make a sale if there was already a chunk of money allocated to what you were selling. The existence of a budget line item meant that the hard battle over whether the company should spend money on a solution had already been won, now the only questions was which solution to buy. That’s one of the reasons why I think that ML could make dramatic inroads in this area, because manufacturers already have engineers, money, and silicon area earmarked for video and audio compression. If we can show that adding machine learning to existing solutions improves them in measurable ways (for example quality, speed, or power consumption) then they will be adopted quickly.