NVIDIA CEO Hands out Special CEO Edition Titan V GPUs to AI Researchers
At the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Salt Lake City Wednesday, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang told top AI researchers he wanted to help them achieve a very different kind of peak performance — before unveiling a big surprise, a 32GB CEO edition Titan V.
“The number of problems you guys are able to solve as a result of deep learning is truly amazing,” Huang said, addressing more than 500 guests at NVIDIA’s “best of Utah” themed CVPR bash at the Grand America Hotel. “We’ve dedicated our company to create a computing platform to advance your work. Our goal is to enable you to do amazing research.”
Then he sprung his first surprise on the crowd. Huang called up 12 teams of researchers and presented each with an NVIDIA Pioneer Awards. The awards went to those who’ve used NVIDIA’s AI platform to support great work featured in papers accepted by CVPR and other leading academic conferences. Wednesday night’s award recipients were an elite group, representing some of the leading academic institutions that participate in the global NVIDIA AI Labs (NVAIL) program. Honorees included researchers from the Chinese Academy of Science, DFKI, Peking University, Stanford University, Tsinghua University, University of Toronto, University of Tokyo and University of Washington.
Titans for the Titans of AI
Twenty guests selected at random joined Huang in the hotel’s center courtyard. There he presented them with signed, limited edition NVIDIA Titan V CEO Edition GPUs, featuring our groundbreaking NVIDIA Volta Tensor Cores and loaded with 32 gigabytes of memory. Among the lucky ones was AI researcher Fabio Ramos, from the University of Sydney who is doing groundbreaking work in the field of robotics. “My work is focused on helping robots make decisions autonomously. I hope to use this to help advance my work to help robots take care of elderly people,” he said, as other guests noshed on chicken sandwiches prepared by Food Network star Viet Pham. While the food and drinks — which included green jello, a nod to Utah tradition — had guests buzzing, researchers were even more eager to dig into their new GPUs.
The limited edition GPU is built on top of NVIDIA’s breakthrough Volta platform. It features our revolutionary Tensor Core architecture to enable multi-precision computing. It can crank through deep learning matrix operations at 125 teraflops at FP16 precision. Or it can blast through FP64 and FP32 operations when there’s a need for greater range, precision or numerical stability.
With 20 of their peers equipped with some of our most powerful GPUs to accelerate their work, these won’t be the last to be so honored.
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You seem to have this weird obsession with connecting the word "elite" to Huang and I don't know why.
That's because I never said or implied that.
Not true - many people inherit their wealth and prestige. I mean take India for example - that country is heavily based on a caste system, rather than merit.
Which part of the argument specifically? I'm saying that it's fine to reward people who put hard work into it, regardless of their status. For that reason specifically, I think handing out these GPUs to the researchers is a great thing.
I agree.
Treat the word "elite" literally, and yes, that is actually what's happening, hence me pointing it out.
I'm not trying to make it a big deal, but it keeps being pointed out. I'm actually just more annoyed at Huang's ego, with the word "elite" as a sidebar.
Anyway, I'm not saying Nvidia is guilty of elitism, I'm saying it's a poor choice of words.
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INTEL used to not be afraid of AMD , look were they are now , just saying

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I find it interesting that this is the first full GV100 Titan product.
And as Hilbert mentions in the article Nvidia is listing it as 125 tflops vs the GV100's 112 tflops. Must have been some frequency changes.. I guess it's still probably limited on multi-gpu performance vs an NVLink 32GB GV100 setup. Still its pretty impressive to see a full 800mm2 chip in a product that's designed for prosumer market. They must be getting decent yields although I guess they technically aren't selling these yet.
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I heard he gave them to Sex bot creators...
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Look up the definition of elite (from Google):
"a group or class of people seen as having the greatest power and influence within a society, especially because of their wealth or privilege."
By this definition, elitism is a result of classism. It's basically like saying "only these people are worthy" and in my opinion, I don't like that connotation. A more positive approach would've been to describe them as earning these GPUs.
I think you're making too much out of this word. I don't think Nvidia is guilty of elitism here, they're just using a word to describe the top AI researchers (they could have used the word "leading" or "pioneering" and it would have meant the same). I don't think anybody is referencing their wealth or privilege in receiving these GPUs.
But a blog poster is using their own words in reviewing a presentation; do you actually think a CEO has time(or even does, they don't) to proof read through one of many blog posts?
To be fair, the blog post was written by the PR director for their data center business (it's not just some random employee). The PR department usually handles official communications so it's about as authoritative as it will get.