It doesn't sound that different from Alex Krizhevsky training AlexNet on a pair of gaming GPUs in his bedroom, winning ImageNet, and launching the current wave of deep learning / AI.

The big difference is that Bill's dad was one of the best corporate lawyers in America. Microsoft might not have amounted to much if they hadn't struck some extraordinarily prescient licensing deals at the right time and place.

Great point, I was thinking more on the Transformer architecture, but I stand corrected.

Google started similarly with PageRank as far as I remember.