I don't think anyone would ever argue that a government should do things it shouldn't. The most common disagreement is not if the government should do more than it should, but what exactly it should do. :P
I don't know about this. My feeling from working with Typescript and Javascript is that the type hints really help people understand what is happening. My background is as a Python programmer, but Typescript really convinced me that optional type hints are a super-valuable addition to a dynamic language. Most of my docstrings in python tend to be type annotations anyway -- might as well make it possible for tools to support it easily.
They don't state flops because they don't do floats. The nervana chip has some weird fixed point format that they think works better for deep learning. I've heard similar noise out of Google (the other TPU company ...), so I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see the same in many of the specialized chips that people will build for deep learning.
I really don't think CUDA support is important for nervana's offering. They think of themselves as the Apples of deep learning - they want to offer an integrated stack from the chip all the way to the APIs. The way most people use deep learning you don't really need to know CUDA, you just need to use a library that is fast. So it's enough that nervana's engineers know how to write deep learning libs for their own chip. Furthermore I can't see Intel caring that much about CUDA support, since CUDA is owned by Nvidia.
What I've heard about the chip makes it sound really exciting. Many of the trade-offs in deep learning are different from the ones you do in graphics, so specialized hardware makes sense.
