It used to. Some time in the mid 2010s it changed to General Processing Unit, driven by things like PhysX, crowdsourced protein crunching efforts like Folding@Home, and particularly the cryptocurrency mining boom.
Now we're in the 2020s and GPUs are all about being Generative Processing Units thanks to the "AI" craze.
I don't think that is the prevailing sentiment. GPU still means Graphics Processing Unit to me and most tech people I know. I think it's more just in the folding and crypto communities that people have repurposed the initialism.
But I have still used GPUs as graphics processing units for game and little else this entire time as has everyone I know. Who decided on this nonclemature change? Because it certainly doesnt represent the primary use case...
Downvotes mean little, arguably even moreso than Reddit. I've noticed I've garnered a dedicated downvote squad who tend to make the rounds once or twice a day.
But that aside: Surely you've heard of GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit), a term I again call bloody stupid. Just call it a General Processing Unit in that case. More recently, the amount of money changing hands in furious bids for more Generative Processing Units to fuel the "AI" craze absolutely dwarves actual graphical applications and even the general use cases.
I'm merely calling the bird that quacks like a duck a duck, not a swan duck bird.
The "truth", for what that's worth, is that GPUs haven't been about graphics as a primary concern for quite a while now and the terminology hasn't kept pace.
Besides, we're apparently here talking about GPUs that can't do graphics.
Dalewyn simply posted a substantial truth in imprecise terms. Some interpreted it fixated with its literality - which was irrelevant.
A search for the use of 'Generative Processing Unit' can reveal that the expression may be far from widespread. Nonetheless, GPUs today are importantly that. Explicit adoption of that expression matters little in this context - it is not the point. In fact, I initially misread the text in the post as "General Processing Unit", and it still made sense.