Nvidia and the GPU: contribution to the AI world of self-driving cars

The first time I watched the DARPA challenge for self-driving cars I thought this was a breakthrough I want to be involved in. But to my surprise, the challenge was in 2005 -- so long ago and yet nothing came to the market for a long time. Moreover, Artificial Neural Networks -- the algorithms to process all this data was developed in the 1960's (!!). So what happened all of a sudden and what has changed to make self-driving cars (and AI) go forward? The answer is Nvidia happened, aka GPU chip designs (Graphics Processing Units) -- even if at the time the big breakthrough happened, Nvidia was not aware they made this huge contribution.