Nvidia's "Woodstock of AI" Conference GTC 24
What you need to know.
Hello Everyone,
Nvidia’s GTC is finally here in 2024. Dubbed the Woodstock festival of AI by Bank of America analysts, GTC this year is set to draw 300,000 in-person and virtual attendees for the debut of Nvidia Corp.’s B100.
I’m really a fan of Nvidia, so I was really looking forward to their GTC conference which has started (March 18th to 21st). I’ve been waiting for this keynote address by Jensen Huang for weeks so here it is:
Keynote GTC Nvidia Conference March 18th
Back when Nvidia was known for GPUs for gaming and crypto, GTC wasn’t such a big deal. But now that they are known for A.I. chips it feels like everything has changed. The NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) is NVIDIA's premier event for AI innovators, developers and enthusiasts.
As I have begun to dabble in Semiconductor and AI chip coverage, I’m overwhelmed with the dynamism of the datacenter and AI chip industry. Check out my Semiconductor Things, a new Newsletter.
I’ve been looking forward to more information on B100, and B200 (two of which can morph into a GB200) for a long while. New chip architecture promises big performance boosts that could reduce the compute of Generative AI models. Meanwhile Nvidia has a rare monopoly on the A.I. chip and datacenter space and will now experiment with custom AI chip orders.
The Stock Market Loves Generative AI
Nvidia’s stock NVDA 0.00%↑ is up 241% in the past year alone YOY. For a company that size, that’s unprecedented in the history of BigTech. There is a lot riding on Nvidia’s success including the valuation and ‘market sentiment’ of the entire Generative AI space.
The NASDAQ 100, a benchmark for Tech stocks, is up over 40% in the last year.
The GPUs that Nvidia produces and the H100 that had such a high demand is now getting older, and a new generation of AI chips and custom AI chips will be led once again by Nvidia, globally.
“Nvidia today accounts for more than 70 percent of A.I. chip sales and holds an even bigger position in training generative A.I. models, according to the research firm Omdia.”
Blackwell Platform for Nvidia in 2024
Powering a new era of computing, NVIDIA on March 18th, 2024 announced that the NVIDIA Blackwell platform has arrived — enabling organizations everywhere to build and run real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessor. - Learn more.
DGX Grace-Blackwell GB200: exceeding 1 exaflop compute in a single rack.
Put numbers in perspective: the first DGX that Jensen delivered to OpenAI was only 0.17 Petaflops.
GPT-4-1.8T parameters can finish training in 90 days on 2000 Blackwells.
Some analysts are cleverly saying that a New Moore’s law is born.
In 2024, hardware and software, incumbents and new startups are converging in a unique way for the future of Generative AI, like we’ve rarely ever seen before in the history of technology. It’s powering so much innovation in the U.S. and China, it’s hard to keep track of. Certainly very few Western news outlets or Creators are aware of what’s going on in China.
Nvidia is in many ways, the touchpoint for the future of A.I. hardware. I cannot stop writing about Nvidia in recent months:
To see my posts on Nvidia in chronological order go here.
Insights from GTC 2024
A shorter video on Blackwell (2:36):
According to the company, the Blackwell GPU architecture features six transformative technologies for accelerated computing, which will help unlock breakthroughs in data processing, engineering simulation, electronic design automation, computer-aided drug design, quantum computing and generative AI — all emerging industry opportunities for NVIDIA.
Generative AI
Quantum computing
Accelerated computing
Data processing
Engineering simulation
Electronic Design automation
Computer-aided drug designs
Nvidia’s latest chip architecture promises to be impactful across technologies and R&D as a whole.
Nvidia also announced later Project GR00T, our new initiative to create a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robot learning. Nvidia is also making strides in things like Robotics (learn more) and Quantum computing partnerships.
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