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CUDA was well-used in HPC and other compute-intensive spaces long before neural nets were in style.

If you look at the evolution of GPGPU computing, at least from an HPC perspective, CUDA is almost an obvious step. What’s perplexing is that AMD and Intel let it get so far ahead in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

CUDA was a formalization of what happened outside of NV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#History

That was becoming a hot topic at the time prior to DL getting on the map but it was smart to recognize the latent demand for GPGPU. Was still going to lead to solid growth with AI was just not going to be the exponential growth we saw if it didn't happen.