Comment by BeetleB
10 hours ago
What year are you talking about? When I was in grad school, around 2007, Nvidia was aggressively marketing GPUs for high performance computing. They would go to campuses, talk to professors, etc.
Yes, the whole Deep Learning thing was luck, but as with most lucky things, they ensured they were positioned to capitalize on it.
Probably cerca 2014 as that's when AlexNet was released, demonstrating that neural networks could beat traditional ML models at image recognition tasks. I recall the researchers used Cuda to optimize their training setup.
AlexNet kicked off a new wave of research around neural networks by demonstrating they could be scaled well and trained on GPUs.
Yeah - definitely by 2014 they were well entrenched within academia with their CUDA offerings. By that point it wasn't "luck".