I was at NVIDIA at that time working on ML on GPUs. Jensen is indeed a visionary. It’s true as you point out that NVIDIA paid attention to what its customers were doing. It’s also true that Ian Buck published a paper using the GPU for neural networks in 2005 [1], and I published a paper using the GPU for ML in 2008 while I did my first internship at NVIDIA [2]. It’s just not true that NVIDIA’s success in AI is all random chance.

[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1575717 [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1390156.1390170