[gbin]

I clearly remember Cuda being made for HPC and scientific applications. They added actual operations for neural nets years after it was already a boom. Both instances were reactions, people already used graphics shaders for scientific purposes and cuda for neural nets, in both cases Nvidia was like oh cool money to be made.

[dboreham]

Parallel computing goes back to the 1960s (at least). I've been involved in it since the 1980s. Generally you don't create an architecture and associated tooling for some specific application. The people creating the architecture only have a sketchy understanding of application areas and their needs. What you do is have a bright idea/pet peeve. Then you get someone to fund building that thing you imagined. Then marketing people scratch their heads as to who they might sell it to. It's at that point you observed "this thing was made for HPC, etc" because the marketing folks put out stories and material that said so. But really it wasn't. And as you note, it wasn't made for ML or AI either. That said in the 1980s we had "neural networks" as a potential target market for parallel processing chips so it's aways there as a possibility.