Nvidia draws thousands to AI mega-event
There was no better place on earth Tuesday to witness AI hype meet reality than at GTC 2024, the flagship conference of Santa Clara chip-making giant Nvidia, being held in-person for the first time since before the pandemic. And for the first time since the artificial intelligence boom had put those two magic letters on everyone’s lips.
That was all obvious from one simple factor: the size of the crowd.
Lines for everything, from speaking sessions to concessions, snaked down hallways and wrapped around corners. Restrooms were perennially at capacity, and it was, at times, necessary to elbow one’s way through the expansive hallways of San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center. The company said it had 17,000 registered attendees as of about midday Tuesday, and climbing.
More than just a physical manifestation of the excitement around AI technology since OpenAI released its flagship ChatGPT chatbot in 2022, all the excited chatter, packed hallways and business-card trading confirmed that this event, which was once a pretty technical conference for software and hardware developers, has become the marquee event for the AI industry.
And for anyone looking to cash in on the technology.
Nvidia, which overtook Saudi Aramco as the world’s third most valuable company earlier this month, is commonly described as selling the picks and shovels of the AI gold rush. Its chips and hardware can produce the blindingly fast computing speeds that are critical for the AI industry, including OpenAI, to train its chatbots and image generators.
Now everyone seems to want a piece.
On Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang packed San Jose’s nearby SAP Center with more than 11,000 people for his twohour keynote address where he introduced Blackwell, what he called the world’s most powerful AI chip.
Back at the conference, which runs through Thursday, a couple of guys networking in a very long bathroom line on Tuesday talked about the sardines-in-a-can vibe of the event. One of them noted that there were more creatives and fewer hard-tech attendees this year, and more people overall.
His new friend remarked, nodding, “AI.”
That lack of technical knowhow was a mild nuisance for startup founders like Yiheng Cheng. He was waiting in yet another line, this time blocks away, to pay $17 for a Vietnamese rice bowl at a downtown food court.
An undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania with a six-person accounting startup called Iris Finance already up and running, Cheng said with a smile that he’d spent a lot of his time at the conference fielding questions from money men and the occasional reporter.
At a Monday night conference dinner, he said about half the attendees were nontechnical types with more questions than answers. Attendees had come from as far away as China and Australia, he said.
When asked what brought him to the conference, one tightlipped New York City money manager said only, “The future. What’s next.”
The conference featured some other classic techie staples: $12 rice bowls with vegan “meat” and two guys wearing Apple Vision Pro headsets chatting amicably on the sidelines as if such behavior was completely normal.
It was routinely difficult, or occasionally impossible, to find an open outlet, and sitting down was at times out of the question. Attendees who managed to secure the laptop booths scattered throughout the conference appeared to guard them hawkishly.
Phrases like “large language model,” “GPU” and “low-code platform” seemed to float on the air like incantations.
A mix of Prince hit songs and ’80s fare pumped through the speakers Tuesday morning, replaced with inoffensive, unplaceable ambient techno sounds as the day wore on.
For those looking for a taste of the technical side of things, there was still plenty of red meat.
If attendees were willing to wait in a line 30 people deep, they could listen to Dr. Priscilla Chan, co-founder of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and wife of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, talk about the nonprofit’s work cataloging cell structures using AI to treat disease.
Showing up on time for that event was the same as receiving a tardy slip, however.
A dozen or more conferencegoers lined up outside hoping that one of the lucky few within would lose their seat to the call of nature. Watching the live stream of the event on an overloaded conference Wi-Fi network was mostly out of the question.
Attendees, like robotics engineer Jaime Machuca, learned their lesson quickly, lining up around 20 minutes early for a session with famed robotics company Boston Dynamics featuring Chief Technical Officer Aaron Saunders.
Machuca, who works on autonomous lawn mowers for Toro, said his company’s bots rely on Nvidia’s chips to do the muscular processing they need to identify obstacles, like people.
The problem with idle chatter from those standing in line was that late comers repeatedly took the chance to jump the queue, making constant vigilance a necessity.
That dedication paid off for the lucky ones who got into Saunders’ talk. A high point was a short clip showing Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot, Spot, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT onboard.
Asked to describe what it was seeing, the robot replied glumly: “A generator hums low in a room, devoid of joy. Much like my soul.”
That got a big laugh.