Nvidia's real AI moat isn't "a piece of hardware," writes Wired's Sheon Han. It's CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs . An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say "KOO-duh." So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization. Here's a simple example. Let's say we task a machine with filling out a 9x9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column -- one from 1x1 to 1x9, another from 2x1 to 2x9, and so on -- for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer.…