To say that the AI craze started after the crypto wave died down is disingenuous or misinformed. The future need for GPU's was apparent as soon as machine learning became relevant a decade ago. The effectiveness of transformers, rnn's, q-learning, etc, for language and other applications was not news when GPT-3 launched. NVidia invested heavily for 10 years, including funding research towards ML and AI, and steered the direction of the technology that we have today