Featuring the image that started it all. GPU Purse available today on hellofutureof.com.

When Tessa Barton built the GPU Purse in 2023 — she hadn't anticipated fielding over one million impressions and hundreds of DMs from a who's who list of Silicon Valley technologists on X one year later.

Her original goal? To design something for herself; something that would represent her identity. In the process, her creation — which on the surface showcases something cold, sterile, and artificial: the GPU — struck a deeply human chord.

Virality and Identity

“At first it was shocking. Now, I’m not surprised that the bag has resonated with millions of people,” Tessa Barton and her co-founder Christina Farhat remarked for FutureOf late September.

“The fact that it did just validates that there is a community here, there are all of these incredible women — with jobs in male-dominated industries — proving that there's something interesting about fashion, art, and technology together. We’re proving that you can pursue that and be taken seriously.”

The transparency of the purse and its prioritization of the inner-workings of the graphics processing unit (GPU) — a hardware component that's seldom contemplated, let alone celebrated by the outside world — triggered a torrent of awe-struck and techno-optimistic responses reminiscent of the early internet.

And this awe? It's compounded by the potential for artificial intelligence — an innovation enabled by the GPU — to eclipse even that.

Tessa and Christina would know, their work directly supports AI/ML research at Databricks — Tessa as a research scientist working on pretraining large language models and Christina as a program manager.

The FutureOf GPU Purse

"The dream" — or the 'FutureOf GPU Purse', if you will — "would be to have some sort of partnership with NVDIA where we upcycle their discarded GPUs into fashion pieces” Barton remarked, reflecting on the magnitude of interest.

This dream carries special credence given that — in today's society — technology is more often associated with political strife, climate change, and dystopia than awe or optimism. 

Transforming graphics processing units (GPUs) — one symbol of our changing world — into a purse might not make the whole world optimistic about technology again, but it does beg the question: 

When did we begin to fear rather than celebrate the underlying mechanics of our innovations?

Tessa and Christina — women working at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence with an educated view of how it will change our world — are evidence that transparency (not only via epoxy and resin), visibility, and knowledge can create something beautiful where a fear of the unknown might have otherwise taken hold.