The 2012 Imagenet results which jumpstarted DL did not benefit from Theano or Torch frameworks. Alex Krizhevsky had developed his own GPU accelerated framework

The 2012 Imagenet results which jumpstarted DL did not benefit from Theano or Torch frameworks. Alex Krizhevsky had developed his own GPU accelerated framework (cuda-convnet), and it remained quite popular for a couple of years after the competition, until Theano and Torch caught up with it.