TAMPA- A USF computer science club gave an on-campus presentation on Feb. 19 about how NVIDIA equipment is essential to powering AI.
The AI industry is here to stay now that the technology is here for it. Now it feels like every major tech company has its own AI. Google has Gemini, Microsoft has Copilot, OpenAI has ChatGPT. These companies are in an arms race to build the most reliable AI, and the AI centers that power them all contain tech from one company, NVIDIA.
Members of the IEEE Computer Society Student Branch Chapter at USF explained how NVIDIA’s graphics cards are vital to powering this revolutionary technology, and generously provided food for all the attendees. The club’s hardware lead, Liam Osman, explained what separates NVIDIA’s technology from any competitor. Their tech is so advanced that it’s given NVIDIA a monopoly on the market, and Osman wishes that wasn’t the case.
“I think we really need to question any system that allows super-massive corporations like NVIDIA or TSMC to become so powerful and important to the world, which is completely free from the people’s oversight or decisions,” Osman said.
In Osman’s presentation, he explained that NVIDIA is a company that specializes in making graphics cards, or GPUs. These GPUs were mainly used to power video games on computers and laptops and were marketed to gamers. Running a high-graphics video game on a computer requires astronomical amounts of computations that NVIDIA GPUs can perform with ease thanks to their use of patented CUDA cores.
These CUDA cores are NVIDIA’s unique processing units on a GPU chip, and they’re so advanced that no other GPU company can compete with them. Similar to high-graphics video games, AI is simply astronomical amounts of computations. So when companies began to invent their own AIs, guess what company they employed to help them do it?
Since ChatGPT’s release in November of 2022, NVIDIA has exploded into a multi-trillion-dollar company. They’ve recently surpassed Apple as the largest corporation in the world, with a market cap higher than the GDP of the United Kingdom. In his presentation, Liam referred to AI investment as “an infinite money glitch.” But when asked if a man of his talents would like to work in the growing AI industry, Liam said he likely wasn’t interested.
“I actually am not a huge fan of AI, I put this as a topic (for the presentation) because I know it’s interesting to a lot of people and it’s important to the world, but it’s not really an interest of my own,” Liam said. “Maybe if NVIDIA wants to hire me for $300,000 a year I’ll consider it.”
A similar opinion was shared by Ashley Skylar, a freshman computer engineering major who attended the event. Ashley isn’t interested in AI as a career either, but figures that AI overlapping into his work is bound to happen anyways.
“I think that as a computer engineering major it’s an intersection that’s inevitable… My job might not directly work with AI but I’m sure that my company will have their fingers in that cookie jar in some way or another,” Ashley said.
The IEEE Computer Society Student Branch Chapter at USF is one of the oldest computer science clubs at the University. Current Club President Anzhelika Kurnikova has been leading the group since 2023, and in the past two years, they’ve bloomed under her leadership.
“(The club) had a period when it was frozen because of inactivity of the executive board, and then it got re-opened in 2022,” Anzhelika said. “By the time I joined in 2023, it was already running, but it was kind of like a small organization with not a lot of attendance and not lots of events. In the past two years, it’s gotten a lot bigger.”
In November of 2024, the club hosted TechX in the United States for the first time ever. TechX is a large event where tech enthusiasts, students and professionals can all explore the latest emerging tech. Anzhelika says it was a very big deal for her.
“Nobody in the United States did that, ever. And we were the first student chapter to ever do that. So that was something really big,” Anzhelika said.
For more information about the club and their upcoming events, please visit their social media listed below.
IEEE-CS Student Branch Chapter at USF Socials
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ieee-cs-at-usf/
BullsConnect: https://bullsconnect.usf.edu/IEEECS/home/
Instagram: @ieeecs_usf