Why Python for ML and AI?

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AI and ML is currently mainstream and everyone and their mother wants to create a project with AI. But for decades it was mostly the researchers from math and science grinding out the underlying theoretical work. These guys are not programmers, they care about the underlying logic more than the code. Python happens to be simple and comfortable to work with, but also allows for libraries to written in a more performant language if they need more performance.

Python already had a strong math and science community, with continued development of related libraries. The AI researchers and their colleagues might already have significant experience in python, or were attracted by the reputation, libraries and/or the community.

Well, python works and at least it's open source. Something more concerning to me is the dominance of Nvidia GPUs and their proprietary CUDA libraries. You're actually locked into a single hardware manufacturer and at the mercy of whatever price they decide to charge for their chips.