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Notes -
Crippling GPUs works very well in one context I've seen: FP64. Games don't use it so manufacturers don't get dinged for having lousy performance with it, and engineers/mathematicians/scientists won't flinch at paying through the nose for "professional" GPGPU cards, so with a few exceptions (Titan Black, Radeon VII, and even those were high-end) you get a pittance of FP64 support on consumer cards.
But there's a very well-delineated difference between 32-bit and 64-bit floats. What's the clear technical difference between "bad ML models, which we want to keep away from hobbyists" and "good ML models, which everybody's going to be throwing into their game engines as fast as studios can train them"? The difficulty of slowing down "bad" algorithms but not "good" ones was effectively the problem with crypto rate limiting, (which only brought the cards down to 50% speed and only worked on some crypto types and was quickly foiled via driver or BIOS changes), not any special societal support for cryptocurrency. Compare DRM, which despite massive political and economic support gets broken over and over again because from a technical standpoint the problem statement is almost a self-contradiction.
Yeah, that's plausible. So far, it's been possible to prune down to 16 or even 8-bytes-per, but it's definitely something that takes some tweaking to do right, and may not be possible for all or even most useful models.
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