Vector machines predate GPUs, I haven't made my mind up on these but I wish neural networks did not exist.
what is meant here, is GPUs made neural networks cheap to program and accessible(as consumer level hardware). You could probably buy/rent some dedicated NN hardware(e.g. google TPUs) that
is more specialized(like these vector machines) but it would much more expensive and limited in usability. GPUs turned to be generic computing devices(OpenCL,OpenACC,compute shaders,CUDA,RocM) because flexibility won over fixed-function pipelines.
Ironically the "complex vector processing" turned out to be best done by masses of tiny,dumb CPUs( GPU cores) working as massive network executing some variation of compute shaders(invented to add dynamically computed graphic overlays on a framebuffer).