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.

▲ BeetleB a day ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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cyberclimb a day ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	BeetleB a day ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah - definitely by 2014 they were well entrenched within academia with their CUDA offerings. By that point it wasn't "luck".

▲ caycep a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ jldugger a day ago | parent | next [-]

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...

	▲	caycep 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They definitely were sponsoring ML conferences before 2017, but symbolically, having Jensen/the CEO actually show up at a dedicated session and demonstrate detailed technical knowledge of the conference proceedings in my mind was a turning point. Albeit I remember his words to the crowd of grad students and post docs at the time: "Only Nvidia would announce their flagship card...to an audience who is completely broke!!"

▲ adastra22 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲ adolph a day ago | parent [-]

> 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...

▲ aurareturn 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They didn't make their GPUs for crypto. Crypto companies just bought a lot of their GPUs.

If they had a choice, they would have sold every GPU to gamers instead because a crypto boom was always followed by a crash which flooded the market with used GPUs and crashed Nvidia's stock price.

	▲	adolph 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> They didn't make their GPUs for crypto. Sure they did and still do. They did a good job of managing the bubble but participate in the market nontheless. Read the above article: Nvidia has promised that its new lineup of cryptocurrency mining GPUs, called CMP for short, won't impact the supply of GeForce graphics cards for PC gamers. . . Since these cards are destined for mining rigs they will also lack video outputs. That may mean the resale value is diminished, which has been one reason why miners prefer gaming graphics cards. Or take it from the horse's mouth [0]: `NVIDIA Cmp Hx Dedicated GPU for Professional Mining` 0. https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/cmp/

▲ kridsdale1 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Crypto was a stupid fad, but Nvidia certainly made a lot of money, so being a vendor to a fad is not stupid.

	▲	adolph a day ago \| parent [-]
		Which makes it a Exempli gratia of "an organization that was primed to recognize and pounce on the next big thing." In addition, they also recognized early on some of the weaknesses of crypto-mining as an industry and limited their exposure while making a pivot to the next thing.

▲ georgeburdell a day ago | parent | prev [-]

AlexNet was 2012 and they explicitly called out the use of NVidia GPUs

▲ noosphr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In 2006. The next 20 years of cuda support weren't luck, as anyone trying to use AMD will know.

▲ edelbitter a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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.