Deep thoughts by Daydream

So that was nvidia GTC

I spent the week virtually attending GTC and I have a few thoughts.

Firstly, it seems clear that nvidia is making a major pivot from gaming hardware to machine learning. Sure, they're excited about their Omniverse but half of the Omniverse seminars centered about using the virtual reality platform to generate synthetic training data for training neural networks. Moving forward I think gaming will be the icing on their AI cake. And bitcoin mining is nowhere to be found.

Second, online virtual events do not have the same energy as their real life versions. You can tell they're trying to generate the excitement and buzz, but it just feels like watching YouTube videos. It's also unfortunate that the event offers zero social networking opportunities.

Finally, the events themselves were a mix of solid, content-rich workshops and hour-long nvidia commercials. The trick is to skip the pre-recorded events and get on the waiting lists for the workshops. Some of the workshops were highly domain specific (Monai, for example) but the one I enjoyed the most was Learning Deep Learning presented by Magnus Ekman who wrote a fine book of the same name. It's a fine, attractive primer on neural networks and I highly recommend it.

That's all for now.