Timing is everything here. The swiss army knife approach only loses when tasks stop changing. Intel suffered when workloads like web and mobile stabilized

In AI, we're still in the explosion phase. If you build the perfect ASIC for Transformers today, and tomorrow a paper drops with a new architecture, your chip becomes a brick. NVIDIA pays the "legacy tax" and keeps CUDA specifically as insurance against algorithm churn. As long as the industry moves this fast, flexibility beats raw efficiency