In 2009 NVIDIA wouldn't give Geoff Hinton's group the time of day, let alone a single free GPU to try out to see if they wanted to buy more. Geoff Hinton spoke at a NIPS keynote in 2009 and told 1000 people in the audience to all go out and buy a specific NVIDIA card if they wanted to do work in this area and still NVIDIA didn't bat an eye.