NVIDIA’s GTC event next week (you can sign up here, it’s free) promises to be awesome. This is because, thanks to companies like Microsoft and tools like ChatGPT, we are already seeing Artificial Intelligence (AI) go vertical. And while generative AI, which you will also see at GTC, is amazing and likely will make me more productive, I’m still more excited about being able to have a car drive me or have a robot do a lot of the chores I’m not a fan of (like blowing snow), particularly after this messy winter that seems unwilling to end.
If you only have time for one thing, see NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote. It summarizes much of what is at the event and showcases a lot of what NVIDIA will be announcing. The keynote is at 8 a.m. Pacific Daylight Savings Time on the 21st of March. Seriously, if you want to get a sense of the technology we will be buried in over the next two years, don’t miss this keynote.
Let’s talk about a few of the things I’m looking forward to.
Smarter cars
I’m writing this from New York. In a couple of days, I’ll be flying home to Oregon, landing near midnight after being awake for around 19 hours, and then I’ll try to drive myself home and hope I don’t fall asleep or get jumped by a deer. I’m really looking forward to a time when I can get in my car, tell it to drive me home, and grab a little extra sleep during the drive.
At GTC, you’ll see the current state of the technology you’ll start seeing in cars in a couple of years. The important part of this is building trust that the cars can drive you where you want to go and not take you for a ride that you’ll regret, which is a valid concern. So, part of the reason you may want to see this is to get a sense of the massive amount of testing these systems are going through to make sure they are ready to keep you and your loved ones safe.
You’ll hear about NVIDIA’s unique automotive metaverse that’s used to train the software to handle any potential situation safely. What often happens when we get into an accident is that we’ve never experienced the related sequence of events before that led up to it. But the coming autonomous cars, at least those using and trained on NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform, are vehicles that have the equivalent of decades of driving in all kinds of weather, during all times of day or night, and have faced everything from kids or pets running out between cars to floods and other major weather events. They’ve been through the scenarios and learned to deal with them like experts.
Unless you see the depth of the training and testing that goes into these vehicles, you’ll likely not trust the technology, but being able to watch TV or movies, sleep or read while your vehicle does the driving will be incredible, so it would be a shame to distrust the technology needlessly.
Robotics
A lot of the show is about robotics. At a Dell event years ago, a futurist said that the next big computing revolution would be robotics. He clearly got that wrong because generative AI has come to fruition long before my robotic snowblower ever arrived (granted, it was supposed to arrive before Christmas but ran into difficulties).
At GTC this year you’ll see NVIDIA’s latest robotics platforms for drones (air, ground, and sea), autonomous farm equipment that provides a safer environment for users and showcases ways to deal with fertilizer and pests that doesn’t pollute groundwater, and what should be an incredible number of automated mobile tools that will bring my personal goal of a robotic butler ever closer to reality.
A past NVIDIA event hosted a kid who built a drone business using NVIDIA’s hardware and tools. If you want to learn how to use some of these tools, GTC has initial training sessions you can attend as well.
Wrapping up:
Every GTC brings me one step closer to having automated systems that do all of the things I hate doing, like driving late at night when I’m tired, cleaning, snow blowing, farming (or yard work in general), and taking the dog out to poop in the ice and snow.
With the advent of rapidly evolving AI, a lot of jobs are going to become obsolete, but a lot of new and often better opportunities will emerge for those that know how to develop and use these new tools. GTC could be your best place to start to better prepare yourself for this new future and ride the coming technological wave rather than be buried by it.
The show is free and virtual, and I am so looking forward to getting another glimpse of our AI-automated future.
