Nvidia sees government as its next A.I. goldmine

Nvidia, a publicly traded company that makes graphics processing units (GPUs), has been focusing its business more and more completely on artificial intelligence (A.I.) after having managed to sell considerable quantities of GPUs for that type of computing work to big companies like Facebook and Google. Those GPUs sit in servers, rather than desktops, laptops, or mobile devices, where Nvidia sticks GPUs for gaming, image processing, and other workloads. But the use of Nvidia's GPUs for A.I., and specifically deep learning -- an approach that involves training artificial neural networks on bunches of data, such as images, and then getting the neural networks to make inferences about new data -- has gained particular traction in the technology industry. Now Nvidia wants to see government agencies adopt and expand their use of deep learning -- which today typically relies on GPUs -- particularly during the training phase. "One of the reasons why I'm going to Washington is I want to talk to a lot of government customers and find out what they're most interested in and what they want to find out about," Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally told VentureBeat in an interview.