Nvidia aims to train 100,000 developers in deep learning, AI technologies
Nvidia said it plans to train 100,000 developers through its Deep Learning Institute.
For Nvidia, the Deep Learning Institute, an effort to train developers in machine learning and artificial intelligence, is a way to create a well of expertise that can ultimately lead to more sales of GPUs.
The bet for Nvidia is that IDC estimates that 80 percent of all applications will have AI as a component by 2020.
Nvidia's Deep Learning Institute launched a year ago and has held training events at academic institutions, companies and government agencies. So far, Nvidia's efforts have trained more than 10,000 developers who use Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 P2 GPU instances.
Greg Estes, vice president of developer programs at Nvidia, acknowledged that training 100,000 developers in 2017 is ambitious, but added that there is strong demand and expanded content can broaden the audience.
In an effort to train 100,000 developers in the next year, Nvidia has stepped up its offerings with the following:
- An expanded curriculum that includes courses for self-driving cars, health care, web services, robotics, video analytics, and financial services.
- Courses delivered through AWS and Google's Qwiklabs and various instructor-led seminars.
- Training labs at more locations such as Mayo Clinic, Google, and Stanford.
- Support for deep learning frameworks such as Caffe2, MXNet and TensorFlow.
- A Deep Learning Institute Teaching Kit to cover academic theory and frameworks.
- Partnerships with Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Microsoft.
- Content ports to Microsoft Azure, IBM Power and IBM Cloud.
Estes told journalists at Nvidia GTC it made sense for the company to partner with larger companies.
"They are going to help us expand our reach ... because these companies are much bigger than we are, and they have a lot of worldwide reach," he said.
"I think most people would agree that we are at the very leading edge of artificial intelligence and deep learning -- so if we take our knowledge and expertise there, and we work with these other companies, they can help bring that out into the community -- it's a win for everybody."
In the coming year, Nvidia is also planning to certify engineer competence.
"Today when you go through and you take these learning courses, we give you a certificate that you have attended the course, but we don't have the testing at the end," he said. "That is on our roadmap, and we plan to do that this year."