Comment by yardie
16 hours ago
You should listen to the podcast Acquired, specifically Nvidia and then Jensen Huang. They basically lucked into AI. Some researcher was using Nvidia gaming cards, and reached out to them about questions on CUDA. That email eventually turned them into a trillion dollar question.
What year are you talking about? When I was in grad school, around 2007, Nvidia was aggressively marketing GPUs for high performance computing. They would go to campuses, talk to professors, etc.
Yes, the whole Deep Learning thing was luck, but as with most lucky things, they ensured they were positioned to capitalize on it.
Probably cerca 2014 as that's when AlexNet was released, demonstrating that neural networks could beat traditional ML models at image recognition tasks. I recall the researchers used Cuda to optimize their training setup.
AlexNet kicked off a new wave of research around neural networks by demonstrating they could be scaled well and trained on GPUs.
Yeah - definitely by 2014 they were well entrenched within academia with their CUDA offerings. By that point it wasn't "luck".
to their credit, there was a lot of work behind "luck". Jensen showed up in person in 2017 in NEURIPS and he and likely a lot of his top brass basically sat down and read the entire conference proceedings/abstracts; there was likely a lot of work behind the scenes to behind the ML research pivot.
And 2017 was _late_ in their pivot. They'd been active for much, much longer. Last winter break I sat down to watch every GTC keynote, going back to 2009[1]. Even then, he's talking about expanding to non-graphics workloads. Google's GPU paper[2] just slotted naturally into their existing narrative and were happy to support it. "fortune favors the prepared" as they say.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYuH2Kl_b98 [2]: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
Yeah, The NVIDIA Way goes into a lot of detail on how and why the pivot from graphics to AI happened. This is a prime example of “you make your own luck.” Jensen engineered an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing, and it ended up being AI. But they saw it coming WAY in advance (like 2011/2012, not 2017) because they were explicitly on the lookout.
> an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing
e.g.: previous crypto hype-cycle
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-cmp-graphics-card-availabilit...
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AlexNet was 2012 and they explicitly called out the use of NVidia GPUs
In 2006. The next 20 years of cuda support weren't luck, as anyone trying to use AMD will know.
I might have believe this story, if not at the same time Intel had made an expensive bet on producing not-quite-gaming cards, later looked at the same trillion dollar question.. and then almost decided that this did not bring enough luck to keep spending.