Nvidia’s GTC 2024 event is back in person at the San Jose Convention Center on March 18-21, and will draw more than 16,000 people and perhaps 300,000 online.
In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat, Greg Estes, vice president of developer programs at Nvidia, said the growth since last year — perhaps double the last time it was held in person — tells you about the forward march of AI. Tells a lot.
“Nvidia is in a different place than we were in the world in 2019,” Estes said, referring to the deadline for the in-person GTC event. “There’s a lot of expectations for the company, we’re very excited about the kind of things we’re doing. We’re all on the press. Our place in the world has changed.”
In fact, Nvidia is the darling of generative AI, as its data center chips and graphics processing units (GPUs) are in high demand. Nvidia’s stock price is up 84% this year and Nvidia has a market value of $2.21 trillion, making it one of the most valuable tech companies.
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Nvidia learned that it could reach more people around the world through pandemic-driven online-only GTC events, and so it will keep the digital portion of its event, which will focus on all things digital.
A big key note
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will open the event on March 18 with a nearly two-hour keynote.
Estes said that feedback has shown that the quality of the show is high and that the event is at the heart of the creative AI revolution. Sponsorships are sold out, and many key partners are making an appearance at the event. CNBC’s Jim Cramer will broadcast live from GTC.
“That kind of connection with a mass audience is really fundamentally different than in 2019. The last time we saw live,” Estes said.
The keynote address will take place at the SAP Center, a venue usually reserved for concerts, as it has much more capacity than the San Jose Convention Center. There will be over 300 exhibitors.
“Jensen has a lot of star power,” Estes said.
Professional certification
Nvidia will also introduce a new professional certification in generative AI to enable developers to establish technical credibility in this important domain. Generative AI is revolutionizing industries around the world, but there is still a significant skills gap and workforce needs to be optimized to fully utilize this technology.
Available for the first time from Nvidia, the new professional certification enables developers, career professionals, and others to validate and showcase their creative AI skills and expertise. The new professional certification program introduces two associate-level generative AI certifications, focusing on mastery of large language models and multimodal workflow skills.
“Generative AI has moved to center stage as governments, industries and organizations everywhere seek to harness its transformative potential,” Huang said recently.
Certification will begin at GTC, where in-person attendees can also access recommended training to prepare for the certification exam.
“Organizations in every industry need to increase their expertise in this transformative technology,” Estes said. “Our goals are to help improve the workforce, sharpen the skills of qualified professionals, and enable individuals to demonstrate their skills to gain a competitive advantage in the job market.”
OpenUSD and Generative AI Panel
The event also features 1,700 presenters and more than 900 talks. I will be moderating a session on March 19th at 4pm. The theme will be “Digitizing the World’s Largest Industries with OpenUSD and Generative AI”.
Nvidia’s Omniverse is a platform for bringing together all the tech for the industrial metaverse, or resources dedicated to creating digital twins — things like virtual factories that are copies of physical factories.
“Everything we do is not about creative AI,” he said. “Omniverse and the industrial metaverse and the work we’re doing in core graphics technologies and around OpenUSD (standards for interoperable digital objects and spaces) all continue to be a very strong focus for us.”
Nvidia is working on its Earth 2 supercomputer that simulates the world’s climate to predict climate change in the coming decades.
Live from the show
Also broadcast from the VentureBeat show, interviews with key partners will be broadcast.
Attendees can choose from 20 full-day, hands-on technical workshops, with many sessions available virtually in the EMEA and APAC time zones. In addition, attendees can sign up for GTC Conference +.
Training packages for over 40 complimentary onsite training labs.
Some of the original AI pioneers will be at the event, coming from places like Google and the University of Toronto. A few hundred press will come. Estes said Huang’s talk will be as unscripted as ever, as one of his superpowers is showing great intellectual bandwidth.
As for the topics, “Generative AI is a big thing that everyone thinks and talks about. And one of the things I’ve been thinking about. Last time we did a live in 2019 Had a keynote, generative AI papers were coming out as early research work. And just in that short time, you have a lot of enterprise-grade applications leveraging generative AI. All over the world. , it’s in a completely different place than before.
He also said that Nvidia’s focus is on high-speed computing and aims to surprise and delight people, Estes said.
“It would be a mistake to say that everything is creative AI. It might be the biggest thing. It might be the most transformative thing happening right now. But that’s not to say there aren’t a lot of other things. , “They said.
While GTC overlaps with the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Estes said the company will send many speakers to San Francisco for gaming talks. He said the overlap could not be helped as the space for the show had to be booked in advance so far.
As for other regional GTC shows, Estes said you should expect Nvidia to plan to hold other developer conferences in other parts of the world.
“We will be out of our communities in 2024,” he said.
Tackling difficult topics
Estes said there will be a lot of discussion on the issue of responsible AI, because many people fear it could get out of control or kill a lot of jobs. Through a series of speakers and talks, Nvidia will create a platform for that dialogue, he said. There will also be sessions and space for women, black developers and other community-based sessions.
“You can’t do everything, change everything. But you do what you can to bring together diverse communities and diverse voices in a place like GTC,” he said. There is room to discuss biases, job creation, job termination or job changes. That’s how you make real progress, when you get lots of voices and lots of smart people thinking about hard problems.”
Estes said there will be a lot of discussion about how to create jobs in local communities related to AI.
“There is no perfect answer. And it takes collaboration between many different types of organizations, but there is a role we can play there,” he said.
There will also be considerable debate about the role of AI in Fortune 500 companies.
“Jensen says we’re the only AI company that works with every other AI company,” Estes said. “The location we have is like Switzerland.”
Nvidia’s startup program has nearly five million AI developers and 18,000 startups.
Autonomous AI
Huang will likely bring up the topic of autonomous AI, where each entity — such as a company or a country — considers its data so important that it keeps it under complete control, within the company. or within its borders. The country itself. It will rebuild data centers, Estes said.
He said that there are many governments or government agencies that are representing their local community and they want to keep the data in their country. “They want to have neural networks, big language models that are trained in the local language. They don’t really want to take everything and send it to a big multinational vendor and basically take their data or Paying to give to someone else and then paying to get it back.
I have been to most of the GTCs that have taken place in person and moderated several sessions over the years. I look forward to seeing this manifestation of the AI revolution again in person.
There will be hundreds of VCs at the event, as interest in AI startups is on the rise. There will also be charity events where Nvidia gives back.
More than 700 people have signed up for “dinner with strangers,” he said, and more than 30 hotels are being tapped to accommodate the crowd.
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