I dunno if it’s “luck”. Nvidia in particular made a big bet more than a decade ago on GPU’s having strong aptitude for important general computation problems. Turns out they were right.
Agreed, if you were playing with computer vision and deep learning ~7 years ago, you knew the potential. Nvidia maintained their stranglehold on the software and hardware platforms. OpenAI (and all the great open source research published by others) really blew it open for Nvidia.
The second seems inevitable from the first. Crypto was when people discovered the massive computational power of GPUs, and AI is when people figured out how to direct this power to do useful work.