The annual Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas has become the best place to learn about what's coming to cars. This year, however, the wild new capabilities rolling through CES, and into the auto industry, went from an open secret to headline grabbing news. As a result, it was an incredible week for us. Since we unveiled our AI computing platform for autonomous vehicles at CES last year, DRIVE PX 2 has become the core of the AI revolution sweeping the auto industry. That became clear with the show's opening keynote Wednesday from NVIDIA Co-Founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who announced our new AI Co-Pilot for the car built on DRIVE PX 2, as well as our ever expanding AI Car ecosystem of partners.

As a company, NVIDIA might be best known in the graphics card and gaming market, but its latest project and partnership with Mercedes-Benz is a notable departure. At CES 2017, NVIDIA and Mercedes-Benz announced plans to bring a vehicle with Nvidia-powered AI to market by the end of the year. During a keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Mercedes-Benz VP of Digital Vehicle and Mobility Sajjad Khan Sajjad Khan, Jen-Hsun announced the initial stages of the project, which started three years ago. "When our teams came together there was instant chemistry," Jen-Hsun said. "We share a common vision about how AI can change your driving experience and make it more enjoyable."

In summary, I had a blast at my first GTC. The only downside was that I wasn't on-site long enough to totally absorb everything, certainly not even a fraction of all the great talks on Deep Learning and AI. But no worries, I treated my attendance as a learning experience and I fully intend to drill down on many areas of interest after-the-fact (starting with this field report). As I sat in the conference press room watching the frenetic activity of the attendees passing by, I anticipated hours of fun digesting all that I saw. Look for many future articles here on insideBIGDATA that cover GPU technology, NVIDIA, the vendors I met, as well as leading-edge research taking place in this space. I'm excited, and I hope you are too!

The first GTC took place in a set of hotel ballrooms a few blocks away. That's up from 4,000 last year, a growth rate that's tracked pretty steady since the start of the show. The stage is about five feet off the ground. And on the vast screen is an NVIDIA-green moving image that, as it scans looks like a multi-level rendering of the brain's neural network. With some electronics thrown in between. A great many of those here, though, are scientists and analysts of the computational sort -- those who rely on NVIDIA GPUs to help them crunch the rising sea of data that's engulfing us. A lot are associated with universities, close to 200 of them. Virtually every one of the top 100 university comp sci departments are here. There are also hundreds of companies represented--certainly the dozens of major web-services companies that use artificial intelligence. But also industrials, oil and gas, retail. Err, less so this time. But folks don't seem to mind.