Chipmaker Nvidia is teaming up with the State of California to help educate students and educators on AI.
The partnership — cosigned by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — will train residents on how to use the technology to support job creation, promote innovation, and leverage AI to solve everyday problems, according to a press release from California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Huang said in the release that the partnership will help “train 100,000 students, college faculty, developers, and data scientists to harness this technology.”
As part of that training, educators in California can get a certification from the Nvidia Deep Learning Institute University Ambassador Program, which will connect educators with “high-quality teaching kits, workshop content, and Nvidia GPU-accelerated workstations in the cloud,” according to a press release from Nvidia.
Due to the use of its super popular chips to fuel the AI boom, Nvidia has swelled into a multi-trillion-dollar company. Since the start of the year, the company’s stock has more than doubled, and in June, it briefly claimed the throne of the world’s most valuable company.
California’s collaboration with Nvidia is part of the state’s recent efforts to solidify itself as a center for the groundbreaking technology.
Last September, Newsom signed an executive order that called for several provisions on responsibly deploying the technology and directing state agencies to examine its best uses. Earlier this year, California revealed a state worker training program, held a generative AI summit, and launched pilot projects to understand how the technology can address everyday challenges like traffic congestion and language accessibility.
That said, Newsom seems to be walking a fine line between regulating the technology and incentivizing its development.
“I don’t want to cede this space to other states or other countries,” Newsom said at an AI event in San Francisco in May, according to Politico. “If we over-regulate, if we overindulge, if we chase the shiny object, we could put ourselves in a perilous position.”
