How Nvidia Leapfrogged the AI Chip Market

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showed up at a gathering of artificial intelligence researchers in Long Beach, Calif. One was an orchestral piece inspired by music from the Star Wars movies, but composed by an AI program from Belgian startup AIVA that--of course--relies on Nvidia chips. The music went over big with the crowd of AI geeks attending the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference, known as NIPS, including some giants in the field like Nicholas Pinto, head of deep learning at Apple, and Yann LeCun, director of AI Research at Facebook. LeCun was quoted saying the Star Wars bit was "a nice surprise." Huang's other surprise was a bit more practical, and showed just how competitive the AI chip market niche has become.