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Nvidia GTC’s 14th annual online event features more than 650 sessions, including 70 on generative AI alone.
The online event will take place March 20-23 and my own Industrial Metaverse session will air on the morning of March 22.
Greg Estes, Nvidia’s vice president of marketing, said in an interview that much of the event’s content about Nvidia’s technology ecosystem will focus on talks about generative AI, the metaverse, big language models, robotics, cloud computing and more . Register here for free.
Executives from hundreds of organizations will be presenting including AWS, Dell Technologies, Deloitte, Epic Games, Ford, GM, Google, HPE, Jaguar Land Rover, Lenovo, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle Cloud, Pixar, Samsung, Shell, Target, TSMC , US Space Force and VMware.
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“We’re very pleased with the impact that GTC is having in general because we have at least a quarter of a million people who will be registering,” said Estes. “It could even be significantly higher. This is a measure of [successs]. Second, it’s about the quality of the speakers we get, like Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of OpenAI, who sits down with Jensen.”
The show begins with Founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote address, which will be livestreamed on Tuesday, March 21 at 8am Pacific Time.
Notable Sessions
Perhaps the most interesting session focuses on OpenAI, creators of the viral AI sensation ChatGPT. Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and senior scientist at OpenAI, will join Huang for a fireside chat about AI today and a vision for the future.
Demis Hassabis, CEO and Founder of DeepMind, will share DeepMind’s efforts in using AI to accelerate scientific discovery. And Emad Mostaque, Founder and CEO of Stability AI, will talk about Stable Diffusion and how it has enabled the explosion of generative AI tools.
Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, will participate in a fireside chat with Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of Applied Research at NVIDIA, to discuss how generative AI is transforming the creative process. Anima Anandkumar, Senior Director of Machine Learning Research, will discuss with colleagues from Nvidia and Shell how Earth simulation and modeling can help develop climate change mitigation strategies.
Bill Dally, Chief Scientist and SVP of Research at Nvidia, will share the latest highlights from Nvidia Research.
Members of Nvidia’s automotive and research teams will describe how generative AI is revolutionizing AV development.
“Nvidia has become an AI factory. Our customers use us as that foundry where they can train models, create their own workflows and do whatever they want,” said Estes. “And if they want, they can start from scratch, with the real basics, or they can come to us with fully realized solutions, and we can just help them tune in a little bit better.”
Nvidia’s Bryan Catanzaro will attempt to demystify generative AI for a wide audience.
Pioneering AI artist Refik Anadol will discuss AI’s impact on art with curators from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Nvidia Vice President Richard Kerris. A panel of experts will explain how AI and simulation will advance robotics.
Multiple sessions on how Generative AI can be applied from content creation to graphics to drug discovery from Amgen, Autodesk, AWS, Evozyne, GM, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, London College of Fashion, Microsoft Research and SK Telecom.
The Metaverse and the Omniverse
In my own Industrial Metaverse Status Update session, executives from Siemens, BMW, Bentley Systems, and Nvidia will discuss industrial applications of the metaverse. But there aren’t 70 sessions in the Metaverse.
Does this mean Generative AI is eclipsing the Metaverse?
“That’s such an interesting question. The crazy part of the idea of companies creating these 3D worlds for consumers to interact in goes back to Second Life,” says Estes.
There’s some weirdness about it. However, Nvidia is focused on industry and enterprise interest in the Metaverse, where the enterprise ecosystem is taking advantage of Nvidia’s omniverse collaboration tools. He said Omniverse is like the foundation of companies that build digital twins and do product design and robotic simulation, factory planning and so on. This is the revenue-generating part of the metaverse, he said.
“We are a kind of industrial metaverse. We’ve always tried to be part of the crazy part of the metaverse. We are the ones who focus on business. So what you can see at GTC are many examples of the biggest names you can imagine from different industries supporting their workflows, doing real business work and using Omniverse.”
And with Omniverse, Nvidia is taking a more open approach to connecting tools from different companies around standards like Universal Scene Description used to share 3D assets, rather than competing with Autodesk, Adobe and others. Nvidia will provide the underlying hardware and also part of the software infrastructure.
“We’re right in the middle,” he said.
Startups and venture
Nvidia Inception, a startup program with more than 13,000 members, will host courses aimed at helping startups grow their businesses and gain industry knowledge. The Nvidia Venture Capital Alliance program, which has 400 VC firms as members, will host sessions for investors.
Overall, Nvidia has more than four million developers in its developer program.
“It has continued to grow very rapidly,” Estes said.
Sessions will include presentations on foundational technologies for GenAI startups. These AI startups are learning about the performance, cost, and scalability benefits of using Nvidia Software Development Kits (SDKs) to accelerate generative AI with Nvidia technologies.
Nvidia experts will focus on venture capital topics for the year, covering the latest breakthroughs in generative AI, and a group of venture capitalists will discuss startups leveraging new AI-generated approaches. Startup founders will also explain how they develop new generative AI solutions and operate in a dynamic market.
diversity and inclusion
According to Estes, GTC is an open, globally accessible event. Developers, researchers, scientists, educators, professionals and students from historically underrepresented groups are encouraged to participate. As part of Nvidia’s efforts to increase AI workforce readiness and create a more inclusive AI ecosystem, GTC will host training and sessions.
A panel of AI experts will discuss their career paths, including their challenges and key takeaways in their quest to change the world. Nvidia researchers will share their professional experiences and tips for students to accelerate AI research.
In addition, Nvidia provides credits for Nvidia Deep Learning Institute workshops at GTC to institutions such as HBCUs, HSIs, and community colleges that serve minorities.
“We continue to bring in the absolute brightest minds, not just in AI, but in supercomputing and graphics and everything,” he said. “I think GTC has really evolved since our humble beginnings. We certainly tried to create a unique place for GTC in the world where we were either the only conference or one of the few that brings together the academic researchers and the companies and the entire ecosystem of stakeholders. Things that started as early research are now at big companies like MasterCard, Pepsi, Netflix and General Motors, Target and Sony.”
The right time
Estes said he’s proud that big companies use GTC to talk about new innovations. While ChatGPT surprised everyone, Nvidia’s program has already delved deep into generative AI, Estes said.
“The whole world changed a few months ago. To the right. With ChatGPT and generative AI, it wasn’t long ago that if you weren’t here at Nvidia you might be at a barbecue and I was having trouble explaining to your neighbors down the street what you do for a living. There are some areas that have really captured the public’s imagination.”
Nvidia is positioning itself as the company with the platform that people will use to take advantage of new technologies like ChatGPT.
Rather than making GTC the biggest tech conference, Estes said the goal is to help the community.
“I’m very proud that the team is working very hard to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to start with just being a really impactful and useful conference for developers and researchers,” said Estes. “I think we will have record numbers this time. But it’s about big. It’s about impact.”
Estes believes the event will eventually take place physically again, but he’s not sure when that will be just yet.
“GTC is the perfect place at the perfect time for the industry to come together and share notes, learn what people are doing and announce new products and technologies,” said Estes.
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