Date: 2024-10-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00026423
TECHNOLOGY
NVIDIA
Nvidia's 'Woodstock of AI' has begun. Here's what to know ... Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may debut the next generation of the company's AI chip at its GPU Technology Conference
NVIDIA
Nvidia's 'Woodstock of AI' has begun. Here's what to know ... Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may debut the next generation of the company's AI chip at its GPU Technology Conference
CEO-Jensen-Huang ... Photo: Ann Wang (Reuters)
Original article:
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
I laugh every time I read a news story like this one.
I learned something about electronics as an engineering student at Cambridge in the UK in the late 1950s. Fast forward, I was recruited into the Gulton Industries management team in early 1960 as the 'budget manager' with the mandate to help stop the catastrophic losses the sprawling company was experiencing after huge profits and crazy acquisitions in the 1960s.
Gulton had been an electronic technology pioneer in the 1960s and dominated the market for 'discreet' elecrronic components. With the events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gulton as it then was got into serious financial difficlties. My job was to do help mitigate the disaster.
One of our flegling initiatives around 1970 was to manufacture ceramic 'chips'. I remember some Gulton 'chips' that featured 6 transistors! The idea that a modern 'chip' thousands or even millions of transistors ir equivalent is very thought provoking.
My own career has embraced a lot of different chapters. I have done some good, and have learned a lot about the world's problems. I have also got some insight into what many of the problems never get fixed. The system is complex and few people know how the system works. Many of those that learn how it works use it for their own rather thn for public benefit ... and nobody hasd done much about it for all of history.
While our knowledge of science has progressed in an impressive manner, my POV is that our 'management' of the cosio-enviro-economic system has not progressed very muc at all but rather has substantially regressed. There are many reasons for this. Change for the better is possible but a lot of hard work is going to be required in order to make up for lost time.
Peter Burgess
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang may debut the next generation of the company's AI chip at its GPU Technology Conference
Written by Britney Nguyen
Published 8 hours ago ... Updated 3 hours ago
Watch live: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang addresses the chipmaker’s AI conference
The company behind the most desired hardware in the world is expected to reveal the next generation of its AI chip this week at a conference that’s already been dubbed the “Woodstock of AI” by employees and analysts alike.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is hosting the AI chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, where he’ll be joined by fellow power players in the AI industry, including Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer of OpenAI, and Arthur Mensch, chief executive of Mistral AI.
Huang is likely to announce the next generation of the company’s H100 chip — the B100. It’s rumored to be Nvidia’s first multi-die chip, meaning a large design partitioned into smaller pieces. If so, the chip is expected to be even more powerful than its predecessor. Microsoft and Meta are the largest customers of the H100 chip, with both tech giants spending $9 billion on the chips in 2023. Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, and Oracle were also top spenders on the chips last year.
But the frenzy over Nvidia’s H100 chips has worried some companies over shortages, and competitors keen to stay ahead in the AI race have started building their own versions of the chips. Amazon has worked on two chips called Inferentia and Tranium, while Google has been working on its Tensor Processing Units.
Despite the competition, Nvidia’s been on a hot streak, becoming the first semiconductor company to reach a $2 trillion valuation in February. The company had seen its stock fall before reporting its fourth-quarter earnings, but rebounded after beating Wall Street’s expectations. The company reported revenues of $22 billion in its fourth quarter — up 270% from the previous year. Nvidia also beat out Amazon and Alphabet to become the U.S.’s third-most valuable company by market cap in February, and bested Saudi Arabia’s Aramco to become the world’s third-most valuable company in March. But Wall Street can’t make up its mind over Nvidia’s success: some characterize the hype as a bubble, and one that will burst soon.
What to watch for at Nvidia’s GTC this week
Monday, March 18
⛰️ A view from the top. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a two-hour keynote at the SAP Center in San Jose, where he’ll discuss the company’s AI advancements this year.
👽 AI-liens. Around Huang’s keynote address, Nvidia executives and researchers will host panels on topics including extraterrestrial intelligence, diffusion models, autonomous vehicles, AI ethics, and cybersecurity.
💊 Robo-meds. Daniel Ferrante, managing director of AI and data strategy at Deloitte Consulting, will host a talk on AI-powered drug discovery with Atlas AI, a product developed together by Nvidia and Deloitte.
Tuesday, March 19
👫 It’s personal. Fei Fei Li, co-director of Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI), will host a fireside chat with Bill Dally, chief scientist and research SVP at Nvidia, about the AI revolution’s impact on humanity.
🔍 Whose responsibility? Joelle Pineau, vice president of AI research at Meta, will host a session on “the responsible training and deployment of AI research systems” to mitigate risks in models currently being developed.
🎬 Up in lights. Nikola Todorovic, co-founder and CEO of visual effects company Wonder Dynamics, will discuss AI in the media and entertainment industries.
🤫 Grok gossip. Christian Szegedy, co-founder and research scientist at Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival xAI, will have a fireside chat with Nvidia data scientist Bojan Tunguz on how AI-based reasoning can be used in software synthesis and verification, the importance of data for large language model (LLM)-based chatbots, and Grok’s “fun mode.”
Wednesday, March 20
⚠️ Cyber-war. David Reber, chief security officer at Nvidia, will host a panel on what cybersecurity leaders at companies and organizations should know about mitigating risks of generative AI.
🇫🇷 M-ai-s oui. Mistral AI’s chief executive Arthur Mensch will deliver a talk on what the French OpenAI rival has learned while training its generative AI models, Mistral and Mixtral, along with what it’s expecting for the rest of the year.
🫥 Now you see it. Graham Brookie, vice president of the Atlantic Council, will host a fireside chat with Nvidia deputy general counsel Iain Cunningham on the challenges of AI-generated deepfakes and disinformation.
Thursday, March 21
📚 Open(AI) book. Brad Lightcap, chief operating officer at OpenAI, is expected to talk about which products are coming from the generative AI giant next.