- Nvidia’s annual GTC conference wrapped up on Friday after a week of panels and exclusive events.
- The weeklong tech showcase highlighted advancements in AI, robotics, and quantum computing.
- Here are five key points to take away if you missed the GTC festivities this week.
The Super Bowl of tech was held this week in San Jose, drawing audiences from around the world to marvel at advancements across the industry that were showcased during Nvidia’s annual GTC conference.
While Nvidia has hosted GTC — that’s short for GPU Technology Conference — since 2009, the event has expanded over the last decade and a half to highlight not just advancements in semiconductors, accelerated computing, and artificial intelligence but also robotics, autonomous and electric vehicles, and future-looking technology like quantum computing.
“People have noticed that the feeling of GTC has really changed,” CEO Jensen Huang said in a Thursday press conference.
And he’s right, the event has changed.
If you weren’t able to attend GTC this year, here’s what you missed.
AI is big business now, and the stakes are higher
In last year’s GTC keynote, Huang mentioned the word “revenue” once. This year it was mentioned 10 times. The message was that it’s time for everyone in the AI ecosystem — not just Nvidia — to make money.
In his keynote, Huang emphasized Nvidia’s evolution from a chip company to an AI infrastructure company that sells “AI factories.”
As he described, AI factories produce intelligence, and the most productive factory should be the most successful. Huang said the quality of each company’s AI factory will have a big impact on its overall revenue. And that applies to any industry, whether it’s traditionally in “tech” or not.
“Every industry is here. Every country is here, and every company is here because we have become a foundational company by which other companies are built,” Huang told reporters Thursday.
Nvidia is at the center of the AI ecosystem
Since Nvidia’s technology enables most of the innovation in AI today, it also sets the bar for what’s possible — how fantastically engineers can apply their imaginations. The next round of chip architecture that Huang described in his keynote address drew a small gasp from the audience in the room due to the power and performance claims.
Cloud companies and AI developers at the conference told BI the ecosystem is still wrapping its head around what massive advances in chip performance will mean for what developers can build and what other players in the infrastructure ecosystem need to prepare. That’s why, Huang explained, the company announced several generations at a time.
“Now everybody else can plan,” he said in a Thursday press conference. “In the good old days, you’re building chips. Somebody buys a chip, they put it in the computer, they sell a computer. What we do now is we build AI infrastructure that are deployed hundreds of billions of dollars at a time, and so you better do a good job planning.”
The cadence of AI innovation has picked up
There was an urgency in the halls of the San Jose Convention Center, likely due to packed schedules and long lines. But the pace of AI model innovation has quickened too, and in side conversations, press conferences, and panels the refrain was that each new paradigm lasts about six months.
Nvidia’s Senior Director of High-Performance Computing and AI Factory Solutions Dion Harris told Business Insider that one of the most important stakeholders he spends time with in his day-to-day work is cutting-edge researchers. They are closer to what’s coming next and can potentially drive the most value, for example, from the AI factory model, in the future.
Robots are coming, but they’re not here yet
The exhibition floor featured a variety of robots and self-driving cars to underscore what Huang said in his keynote.
Huang described robots as a substitute for human labor in short supply, the key that could make every car self-driving and an essential technology in taking physical action on much of the intelligence we can create today.
“Physical AI and robotics are moving so fast, everybody, pay attention to this space. This could very well likely be the largest industry of all,” Huang said in his keynote address.
A robotic future is important to Nvidia as leveraging AI to understand the physical universe and take action in three dimensions will require an immense amount of compute. And if it remains the titan provider of computing power it is today, it is expected to raise Nvidia’s profile even further as it becomes the foundation of a new industry. But many of the robots on display in the convenient center are nascent in their capabilities or still in development.
Nvidia announced a new open-source reasoning model for robotics aimed at accelerating out of the development phases Tuesday. The new model could make robots able to adjust to different tasks and environments on the spot.
“This is gonna make it become viable,” Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia’s vice president of Omniverse and Simulation, told BI. “We can finally build an industry around it.”
Quantum computing is officially on the scene
Once considered a far-away technology (even by Huang himself, who as recently as January suggested we’re 20 years from the technology being “very useful,” sending stocks tumbling), quantum computing was vindicated at this year’s GTC.
Nvidia hosted its first Quantum Day, dedicated to showcasing the burgeoning technology that researchers say could help discover new drugs, develop new chemical compounds, or break encryption methods, among other outcomes.
Huang started Quantum Day by declaring how wrong he’d been just months earlier before welcoming three panels of executives from various quantum computing companies to explain why quantum processing is the next frontier for the tech sector.
While advancement in the field has historically been slow-going due to deeply technical problems with error correction and scalability, this year’s GTC displayed the momentum that has been building behind the scenes from giants like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, as well as lesser-known players like D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti.
Huang said onstage that this was just the first Quantum Day of many to come at GTC, demonstrating that Nvidia’s conference will make space for new developments in the field.
“It seems like next year we’re going to have some quantum demos at GTC,” Huang said Thursday.
