Nobody cared about deep learning back in 2007, when CUDA released. It wasn't until the 2012 AlexNet milestone that deep neural nets start to become en vogue again.

I clearly remember Cuda being made for HPC and scientific applications. They added actual operations for neural nets years after it was already a boom. Both instances were reactions, people already used graphics shaders for scientific purposes and cuda for neural nets, in both cases Nvidia was like oh cool money to be made.