I'm sure the origins of CUDA are very interesting in their own right, and it cannot be denied that the evolution of the GPU and GPU programming has had a huge impact on the growth of the field.. but, without the specific work of these specific people, at worst I think we'd only be a tiny bit behind where we are now.

The AI craze we have today is built on the continuous, sustained work of a huge amount of people over years and years.

yes, of course. I think this holds for pretty much all major inventions, which are attributed to single persons.

At some point in time, certain ideas are just inevitable. I'm certain back then many people were looking at GPUs and tricked them into performing non-graphics tasks.