NVIDIA Chief Scientist On How GPUs Ignited AI

Bill Dally has been working on neural networks since before they were cool. Dally, chief scientist at NVIDIA, is an icon in the deep learning world. A prolific researcher with more than 150 patents, he previously chaired Stanford University’s computer science department. When Dally first started his neural networks research in the 1980s, “we had computers that were literally 100,000 times slower than what we have today,” he told Kravitz. Today’s AI revolution is enabled by powerful GPUs. But it took a lot of work to get there, such as the 2006 launch of the CUDA programming language by NVIDIA’s Ian Buck.