If your ML model takes hours when it can take minutes, or takes days when it can take hours, you will move away. You could move away to another language or a faster interpreter but that's a different discussion.
> more focus con optimizing the interpreter
This is good but there's an upper bound to performance of interpreted languages. Maybe the Python interpreter could be as fast as V8, but it is unlikely to be fast as JVM. People will need to drop down to C / Fortran for whatever compute intensive work they're doing.