Before AI/ML was hot, and before even the Bitcoin paper was released. NVidia was investigating/experimenting/investing in the concept before there was any kind of 'killer app' for it.
And even better, NVidia understood not everyone wants to use plain old C for their GPGPU coding, and early on staring with CUDA 3.0 in 2010, introduced C++ support and PTX.
Later on they acquired PGI, which thanks to PTX, had C, C++ and Fortran compilers, thus adding Fortran into the mix.
Followed along by all the IDE, graphical debuggers tooling and library ecosystem.
Meanwhile Intel and AMD were doing who knows what at Khronos stuck in their "C is good enough" mentality, and barely released useful developer experiences.
My statements based on high level meetings I had at the time with all 3 companies when I had started an early neural network PaaS company and was looking for them to invest. Nvidia knew what they were talking about and were already moving that direction, Intel heard about deep learning somewhere but didn't believe there was anything there, and AMD didn't know anything about anything.
Seems like a tale already told on "Only The Paranoid Survive" by Andrew Grove. Now Jensen should add some chapters. BTW I just discovered that their web page/brand is fully invested in AI, the title is: "World Leader in Artificial Intelligence Computing".
CUDA 1.0 was released in 2007:
* https://insidehpc.com/2007/07/nvidia-releases-cuda-10/
* https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-archive
From SIGGRAPH 2007, "GPU computing with NVIDIA CUDA":
* https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1281500.1281647
"NVIDIA: The Era of the Personal Supercomputing":
* https://www.nvidia.com/content/events/siggraph_2007/supercom...
Before AI/ML was hot, and before even the Bitcoin paper was released. NVidia was investigating/experimenting/investing in the concept before there was any kind of 'killer app' for it.