NVIDIA’s powerful GPUs are capable of far more than just gaming, and NVIDIA has teamed up with Qwiklabs to achieve their goal of showing 100,000 fledgling developers the true deep learning power of those GPUs in 2017 alone through through their Deep Learning Institute. The program will be training ten times as many developers as it did in 2016, if it meets its goal. In order to help meet that goal, NVIDIA is expanding all components of the Deep Learning Institute, with some help from other companies. Qwiklabs is providing some help with expanding and touching up the online version of the program, which can be taken by anybody who wants to give it a try and is willing to put down the money for credits. All programs, whether self-led or instructor led, whether online or in person, will benefit from new content courtesy of big names like Amazon and Google. The Deep Learning Institute will be making an appearance at the Silicon Valley GPU Technology Conference, where 14 different hands-on courses will be offered.
Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, the Mayo Clinic, and Stanford University are just a few of the entities on board to help pad out the program’s content with new labs and courses. New content from Google includes a class pertaining to their popular TensorFlow open-source deep learning framework. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, and Microsoft on the other hand are providing additional considerations for teaching the material, including certifications and volunteering their own people as instructors. Microsoft Azure, IBM Power, and IBM Cloud content is all going to be ported into the program for students to play with. To top it all off, special teaching kits have been made to get instructors off the ground quickly, and able to teach effectively once they begin teaching.
Projections from IDC say that deep learning, along with closely related fields machine learning and neural networking are projected to find their way into 80% of all applications, mobile or otherwise, by 2020. While NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Institute may not be as widely focused as a traditional college, it could conceivably help somebody acquire the kind of specific expertise that could land them a job in the field. The tech sphere of yesterday only looked to the best and brightest from big-name schools to fill big roles, but today’s landscape, rife with startups and risky moves from big companies, gives newcomers a pretty good shot at getting a foot in the door.