The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

“Nvidia invented the GPU in 1999” wrong on many fronts.

Arguably the November 1996 launch of 3dfx kickstarted GPU interest and OpenGL.

After reading that, it’s hard to take author seriously on the rest of the claims.

Possibly technically correct, but utterly irrelevant. The 3dfx chips accelerated parts of the 3d graphics pipeline and were not general-purpose programmable computers the way a modern GPU is (and thus would be useless for deep learning or any other kind of AI).

If you are going to count 3dfx as a proper GPU and not just a geometry and lighting accelerator, then you might as well go back further and count things like the SGI Reality Engine. Either way, 3dfx wasn't really first to anything meaningful.