alt Hacker NewsMost people don't appreciate how many dead end applications NVIDIA explored before finding deep learning. It took a very long time, and it wasn't luck.
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It was luck that a viable non-graphics application like deep learning existed which was well-suited to the architecture NVIDIA already had on hand. I certainly don't mean to diminish the work NVIDIA did to build their CUDA ecosystem, but without the benefit of hindsight I think it would have been very plausible that GPU architectures would not have been amenable to any use cases that would end up dwarfing graphics itself. There are plenty of architectures in the history of computing which never found a killer application, let alone three or four.
It was luck, but that doesn't mean they didn't work very hard too.
Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
It was definitely luck, greg. And Nvidia didn't invent deep learning, deep learning found nvidias investment in CUDA.