Hindsight is 20/20. "Could have not happened" means without hindsight, you could see the possibility that it might not have played out. nVidia didn't know for

Hindsight is 20/20. "Could have not happened" means without hindsight, you could see the possibility that it might not have played out. nVidia didn't know for a fact that deep learning architectures would have been so successful in the past couple years. GP's point is that maybe deep learning would have worked 80 years later, and not have the great breakthroughs around 2016~now. The video from 2015 proves nothing. nVidia was deeply invested into this bet by then, and the mere fact that the video exist is evidence that they already betted heavily on AI by 2015 -- before the big results we know of today came about.