Nvidia is organizing AI's Super Bowl

In 2009, when Nvidia held its first developer conference, the event was a kind of science fair. Dozens of academics filled a hotel in San José, California, decorated with white posters of computer research. Jensen Huang, executive director of the chips manufacturer, wandered around the floor as a judge.

This year, the Nvidia developer conference is very different.

More than 25,000 people are expected to congregate on Tuesday at the event, known as NVIDIA GTC. The crowds will fill a sand from the National Hockey League to listen to a speech about the future of the artificial intelligence of Mr. Huang, who has been nicknamed “ai Jesus”. Nvidia, the world leader of Chips ai, has also wrapped San José in the neon and black green colors of the company, closing the streets of the city and sending prices of hotels that rise to $ 1,800 per night.

They are expected to attend the industry leaders, including Michael Dell, executive director of Dell Technologies; Jeffrey Katzenberg, co -founder of Dreamworks and Wndrco, a venture capital firm; and Bill McDermott, executive director of Servicenow.

“Nvidia makes the chips that are oxygen for ai, so people are alert to learn about their last and better,” said Ali Farhadi, executive director of the Allen Institute of artificial intelligence, which also attends. “The amplitude of the exhibition technology there will be phenomenal.”

The transformation of the NVIDIA conference of an academic event to the Super Bowl of ai, an exhibition of language robots, large language models and autonomous cars, is symbolic of the company's metamorphosis. As ai has become the main current, customers have cried out for the Nvidia graphics processing units, the powerful chips that help create technology. That has driven the chips manufacturer to an assessment of almost $ 3 billion, compared to $ 8 billion in 2009.

However, Nvidia's rise has asked questions. The generative ai, which can answer questions, create images and writing code, has been held for its potential to improve companies and create billions of dollars in economic value. Microsoft, amazon, Google, Meta and others are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to realize that idea.

But the expense has caused concerns on Wall Street and Silicon Valley about whether ai will earn enough money to justify its amazing costs. And the technology trajectory can be overturned by new participants such as Deepseek, a small Chinese company that made a avant -garde ai system with a small fraction of the Nvidia chips that other companies used. (In January, when investors realized what Depseek had done, Nvidia lost $ 600 billion in value in a single day).

In Nvidia GTC, Mr. Huang will seek to assure people who will fulfill their potential, said Patrick Moorhead, founder of Moor Insights & Strategy, a technological research firm. Mr. Huang is expected to explain how ai systems are providing services that people will want to pay, such as ai agents, who can perform homework autonomously such as buying groceries. You are also ready to describe more futuristic uses for ai, such as the development of human size robots that can walk and collect things.

In addition, Mr. Huang is expected to talk about the next generation of NVIDIA's chips, called Rubin, which can offer a faster performance of 30 times faster.

Nvidia declined to comment on Mr. Huang's speech.

Rubin's chip is essential for the permanence of Nvidia at the forefront of ai, the company faces challenges when its customers, including amazon, Google and Meta, make their own ia chips. And Nvidia chips also have to change as IA companies try to obtain a better performance from their ai models.

“The sauce train stops if the cloud companies stop spending,” Moorhead said. Mr. Huang “has to reinforce that he knows what is happening.”

Mr. Huang's ability to command a crowd reminds Steve Jobs from Apple. Before the company's main events, Apple's co -founder spent days rehearsing his speeches about a new iPod, iPhone or iPad, before taking the stage to thunderous applause and looking like his comments as if they were not scripted.

Mr. Huang, 62, is prepared similarly in great detail for Nvidia GTC. Two months before the event, he works with the company's products divisions to identify what to announce, said Greg Este, Vice President of Corporate Marketing of Nvidia. Mr. Huang also works with the marketing team to develop slides and demonstrations to show on stage, create bullet points and verify the facts you can quote.

But Mr. Huang never writes a speech, Estes said. When he takes the stage in his characteristic black leather jacket, he speaks extemporaneously. A speech scheduled for 90 minutes can last more than two hours.

“Sometimes an error will happen and he will say: 'You know, we don't rehearse,” said Estes. “He's not joking. It's 'grabbing and tearing it.'”

Nvidia GTC was previously the GPU technology Conference, which is named after graphics processing units, or GPU. The event, which was designed to encourage developers to use the company's chips, included a research summit where academics placed posters that detail how the components for computer research had used. Mr. Huang spoke with the attendees about what they did with the fries and, over the years, they often heard that they were using them to develop IAI

David Cox, who presented an investigation at an early conference as a Harvard professor, said that most attendees treated academics as “this little strange foot note.” But he said Mr. Huang and other Nvidia executives took them seriously.

“They seemed to understand that we had something here,” said Cox, who is now the vice president of ai Models in IBM Research.

In 2014, Mr. Huang began to dedicate most of his speech at the conference to the way in which Nvidia chips could be used for automatic learning and ai games developers, who used GPU to represent video game graphics and for a long time they had been the heart of the company's business, got angry with change.

“They thought, 'What the hell is this new shiny thing?' “We were as: 'No. No. This is the change of sea'”.

Mr. Huang opted that ai would boost the next great tech boom and that the GPUs would be essential. In 2016, Nvidia developed a supercomputer full with her chips and handed it over to OpenAi, an ai laboratory. Little more than six years later, Operai launched the chatpt chatbot, unleashing a frenzy of ai.

(The New York Times has sued Openai and his partner, Microsoft, for the infringement of the copyright of the news content related to the ai. OpenAI and Microsoft systems have denied the statements).

Since then, Nvidia's finances have shot. The company, which was founded in 1993, increased its annual gain more than 1,500 percent over a period of two years to $ 72.88 billion last year from $ 4.37 billion in fiscal year 2023.

“Jensen has become the CEO of celebrities who always wanted to be,” Rao said. “It is a successful success at night because it captured the ai“