alt Hacker NewsBack in 2002-2003 there were folks attempting to get GPUs to do non graphics tasks because of the amount of potential compute available. I recall running a sorting algorithm on a Radeon at the time. It wasn't quick but it worked.
The idea was out there and Nvidia leaned into it first. GPU compute was going to happen regardless, but credit to Nvidia they actively developed it seeing its future uses.
Nvidia made that idea possible by making GeForce 3 in 2001, we experimented with GPGPU because Nvidia already created the opportunity. And at the time, using a tiny specialized fraction of GPUs (of all things) for general-purpose computation was an absolutely ridiculous idea never taken seriously by most people, even us doing it.