I think it's just ignorance and timidity on the part of investors. Memristor or memory-computing startups are surely the next trend in investing within a few years.
I don't think it's necessarily demand or any particular calculation that makes things happen. I think people including investors are just herd animals. They aren't enthusiastic until they see the herd moving and then they want in.
I have seen at least one experiment running a language model or other neural network on (small scale) memory-based computing substrates. That suggests less than 1-2 years to apply them immediately to existing tasks once they are scaled up in terms of compute capacity.
Many more years than that. And it must be general enough. Otherwise you optimize for A in hardware and 5yr later when producing chips, A is no longer revenant and everyone moved to B.
I would have assumed it would take many years longer than that to scale something like this up, based on how long it takes traditional CPU manufacturers to design state of the art chips and manufacturing processes.
