UltraEthernet predates the AI boom. I don't blame them for adding the AI buzzwords, for this to succeed people need to think about it in the same vein as IB/RoCE/etc and a lot of the decision makers are unfortunately not technical enough to understand what this is or does.
Ultimately it's just a different (IMO slightly more refined) look at how to support RDMA on Ethernet vs RoCE which is a more ham fisted implementation.
RoCE took an encapsulation approach that has some drawbacks (namely it's reliance on PFC/ECN for congestion management).
This takes a different approach that attempts to actually do first-class re-implementations of Infiniband-ish congestion control with end-to-end credit based flow control similar to Infiniband virtual lanes.
> UltraEthernet predates the AI boom.
UEC was formed/announced in July 2023:
* https://ultraethernet.org/leading-cloud-service-semiconducto...
ChatGPT was launched in November 2022:
The writing was on the wall by 2015-2017, earlier still if you're the smart/attentive type.
Yeah I may have underestimated how recent the formation of UEC was but IMO the efforts started around the period you are indicating with a lot of the libfabric guys proposing stuff like this.