The deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

The article credits two academics (Hinton, Fei Fei Li) and a CEO (Jensen Huang). But really it was three academics.

Jensen Huang, reasonably, was desperate for any market that could suck up more compute, which he could pivot to from GPUs for gaming when gaming saturated its ability to use compute. Screen resolutions and visible polygons and texture maps only demand so much compute; it's an S-curve like everything else. So from a marketing/market-development and capital investment perspective I do think he deserves credit. Certainly the Intel guys struggled to similarly recognize it (and to execute even on plain GPUs.)

But... the technical/academic insight of the CUDA/GPU vision in my view came from Ian Buck's "Brook" PhD thesis at Stanford under Pat Hanrahan (Pixar+Tableau co-founder, Turing Award Winner) and Ian promptly took it to Nvidia where it was commercialized under Jensen.

For a good telling of this under-told story, see one of Hanrahan's lectures at MIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk4fvqaOqv4

Corrections welcome.

Jensen embraced AI as a way to recover TAM after ASICs took over crypto mining. You can see that between-period in NVidia revenue and profit graphs.

By that time, GP-GPU had been around for a long, long time. CUDA still doesn't have much to do with AI - sure, it supports AI usage, even includes some AI-specific features (low-mixed precision blocked operations).

Jensen embraced AI way before that. CuDNN was released back in 2014. I remember being at ICLR in 2015, and there were three companies with booths: Google and Facebook who were recruiting, and NVIDIA was selling a 4 GPU desktop computer.