Since shaders were designed for, well, shading, this early experiment was more of an academic playground exercise than useful research. But AlexNet still wasn't

Since shaders were designed for, well, shading, this early experiment was more of an academic playground exercise than useful research. But AlexNet still wasn't the first deep neural network trained using CUDA. It had already been done three years earlier: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1553374.1553486 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1553374.1553486 The ImageNet competition had also been around since 2010. So the ingredients were actually all there before.