Facing the Future at GTC

By: Kenric Hoang

(Image credit: NVIDIA Blog)

Attending GTC was a mind-opening experience that revealed what the future holds for technology and the world, and illustrated just how fast that future is arriving. 

Last month, I attended NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), one of the biggest tech conferences in the world. Beyond hosting industry titans like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon and hundreds of companies under that, GTC attracted roughly 25,000 in-person and over 130,000 virtual attendees. Luckily, it was held just down at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, local enough that I could go.

GTC started years ago as a mainly gaming-focused conference, but has since developed into an AI-focused event with the increased interest in AI. NVIDIA, the company hosting the conference, is known for its GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), which have found much use in AI applications in supplying the great processing power required to train and run models. As the leader in this technology, NVIDIA has the spotlight as everyone else in the industry eagerly awaits good news. 

They really used all of the space they were given. I had been to McEnery a few times for a couple of conventions like Crunchyroll Expo or Fanime, and only the main halls were really used. At GTC, all the space was used, either for talks, exhibits, workshops, workspaces, or testing. 

I went to a handful of talks, but stopped after the initial days. There was a whole schedule for talks, so you had to pick and choose which ones you wanted in one or two-hour blocks. Most talks were 45 minutes + questions, but you had to get out after 40 minutes to run to the next talk if you wanted a seat. The lines start to build up at least 15 minutes before a talk, with the entire hall being packed before people are let in. Once you get in, the seats are literally touching each other, and there are so many people in the room that it really feels like a big can of sardines cooking under a fire. 

Other than that, most of the talks I went to were really good. There was one that discussed an AI model built for recognizing diseases and afflictions using a 3d scan of patients’ internal organs. It could even predict if a patient was going to develop a condition based on similar patterns. This model had a 96% accuracy! I also saw a talk on how we are going to deal with the increased energy consumption from running AI models. It was given by Schneider Electric and was very well put together in terms of presentation, information, and graphs. There were many other cool talks, like computer vision applications and AI-controlled teammates in video games.

The best talk of them all was the Keynote. Everyone was waiting for Jensen Huang’s Keynote speech. It was held at the SAP center a few blocks down and started at 10 am. I got there at 8 am and had to walk half a mile to the end of the line and wait in the cold for about an hour and a half. At 10 I finally got to breathe the same air as Jensen Huang. Wow, he is just downright incredible! He started the speech off saying that he was going in without a safety net as he had no speaker’s notes. I got a bad seat so I could see he really didn’t have any. Jensen talked about all these different developments in AI and collaborations with other companies in great depth for over 2 hours. He did this just off of the pure information that he has familiarized himself with. It is inspirational to me. Jensen is actually knowledgeable in his industry to where he is able to talk about this expansive subject knowledge confidently and in front of 19,000 people. Reaching that level of subject familiarity is what I strive for.

After the Keynote speech, the exhibit halls opened up. This is where all the company displays were set up, some of them more like performances than others. Among the notable ones, there was an F1 driving simulator with a ton of metrics, a handful of robot dogs, a robot that would draw your face, a robot that would walk around and talk to you, a remote surgery robot that you could control… Okay, yeah, most of the cool stuff was robots. There were still plenty of cool and interesting booths in all different sectors of AI. One of the most important things I learned from going to GTC is how to talk to people. Of course, I do already know how to talk with others, but it was a bit awkward talking to industry professionals twice my age and probably not too interested in touching base with a highschool student. Nonetheless, as I got more used to it, interacting with them became natural and I had quite a few solid conversations beyond surface level talk.

Also I got a bunch of merch there which was great. It was like Halloween, but a little more cool and corporate at the same time.

While I was at GTC, I got the chance to try for an NVIDIA certification. NVIDIA has certification exams that test different topics relating to AI and data science applications with their software and hardware. They offered everyone a free certification exam while they were at GTC. I took the Multimodal Gen AI exam and passed, so I am now officially NVIDIA certified 😀

(That’s me! :O  They used my photo in the presentation for the developer party.)

On the last day, a Friday, my group prepared to get to GTC early. I woke up at 4 am to pick some of us up and transfer to the next car. We got to the conference center around 5:30 and there was already a line built up. The earliest people were there at 3 in the morning and as time passed, the line grew by a couple hundred. We were all here to try and snag an RTX 5090, the most valuable graphics card on the market with unseen raw processing power. At 7 o’ clock they announced that they only had 136 left over. Our group were numbers 114-119. They went down the line and handed out red tickets to distinguish who could buy a 5090. As we received ours, we held them feeling like Charlie ready for the chocolate factory. We paid and went to collect our loot later as we left. 

That was definitely a great way to leave the conference. GTC was an exciting experience that taught me about different parts of the AI industry and what the future holds for everyone. It solidified for me that AI is a revolutionary technology that has the ability to help so many people and improve working systems. If you are interested in the AI industry at all, I would definitely recommend attending future GTCs. Even if you aren’t, I would recommend you look out for any conferences related to your interests because these close-up views of the evolving world are more valuable than you can imagine. 

(Me and my friends with our loot. We took a lot of pillows :P)