alt Hacker NewsYou 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.
Replies
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.
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.
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.