Maybe. GPU's are definitely a big part of why this stuff has improved, as you can train much, much faster on larger datasets which is going to improve performa

Maybe. GPU's are definitely a big part of why this stuff has improved, as you can train much, much faster on larger datasets which is going to improve performance. NN's are super flexible though, and I'm not sure you'd have gotten the same level of performance out of other methods. Interesting question though.