I invested in an LLM company in 2014 and nvidia was very aggressive in giving GPUs for use in training models. Their program wasn't targeted specifically at LLMs, but they were definitely aware of the uses.

In case anyone is confused, here's an explanatory tweet about one of the founders of that company: https://x.com/jxmnop/status/1725949517940294055 . LLMs have been in the works for awhile. But you need lots of money to make them good! Even back in 2014 they were mining reddit for training data.

Effectively no one was but LLM's are precisely "ML predictive algorithms". That neural networks more broadly would scale at all on gaming chips is plenty foresight to be impressed with.