NVIDIA CEO over the weekend, held a special event recognizing the efforts of some of the world's foremost AI researchers, and gifted each one of them the first production Tesla V100 GPU compute accelerators. Based on the company's latest "Volta" GPU architecture, the V100 features special "tensor cores," components that speed up deep-learning neural net training, which should have a significant impact on AI research as it cuts down hours or even days of neural net training in a typical project.

At the NVAIL (NVIDIA AI Labs) meetup hosted by NVIDIA, CEO Jen Hsun Huang stressed on the importance of supporting AI research. "AI is the most powerful technology force that we have ever known," said Jen Hsun, "I've seen everything. I've seen the coming and going of the client-server revolution. I've seen the coming and going of the PC revolution. Absolutely nothing compares," he said.