Essentially Crypto lead to huge investment into GPUs and GPU technology, and then once Crypto collapsed lead to a huge capacity of compute power which then decidedly was put into AI.
I doubt that investment into GPU technology would have been driven by the idea of AI alone. Something manic like Crypto had to drive it initially. Without Crypto, I imagine the AI revolution we're seeing today would not have taken place.
The first papers that used GPUs to train neural networks were from the end of the 2000s and the beginning of the 2010s, before the Bitcoin price hike of 2013. But years before that, Nvidia had already introduced the CUDA architecture to GPUs in 2006 [1], which were used, among others things, to speed up algorithms to analyze seismic data for oil and gas exploration [2].
So with or without the "crypto fever", I believe the same advancements in GPU technology would have followed - but maybe not the scarcity brought by the investments in crypto mining. Because of this, we may also argue the opposite, that crypto got in the way of AI development and was one of the culprits of the "GPU rich vs GPU poor" division we hear/read about nowadays.
In a very similar fashion, though, I do tend to believe that PC gaming holds far more importance to the rise of both AI and crypto...
[1] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/nvidia-unveils-cuda-the-gpu-co...