Exactly. This is all an economic question that involves humans, how plentiful they're trained in different topics, the availability of different resources, security requirements (Cold War 2.0 ups security costs, for example), and many other unknown factors like relative breakthroughs in AI, physics, quantum, etc.
But that said, I think point 2 (much more bizarre hardware) is basically guaranteed. As OSS and cloud provided services (e.g., RDS) centralizes our approaches to common problems to a small set of commonly used libraries the common functions of those libraries will continue to get baked into hardware and lower and lower overheads (not just chips, think busses between, etc). Basically TPUs and M2s are the pretremors of what is to come.
I basically think of this all as a massive economic / search problem with highly aligned actors between their neighbouring layers. Though not necessarily beyond their neighbouring layers. For example, breakthroughs in mathematics or in AI driven mathematics could, say, 10x LLVM optimization for common tasks which would dampen demand for CPU in the short to medium term until the economic growth catches up to demand even more in the long term.
But that said, I think point 2 (much more bizarre hardware) is basically guaranteed. As OSS and cloud provided services (e.g., RDS) centralizes our approaches to common problems to a small set of commonly used libraries the common functions of those libraries will continue to get baked into hardware and lower and lower overheads (not just chips, think busses between, etc). Basically TPUs and M2s are the pretremors of what is to come.
I basically think of this all as a massive economic / search problem with highly aligned actors between their neighbouring layers. Though not necessarily beyond their neighbouring layers. For example, breakthroughs in mathematics or in AI driven mathematics could, say, 10x LLVM optimization for common tasks which would dampen demand for CPU in the short to medium term until the economic growth catches up to demand even more in the long term.