This Week in AI: NVIDIA Continues Defying Gravity

When a tech company really takes off, sometimes it really takes off.

When Apple went through its massive growth phase more than a decade ago, Phil Schiller, then the company's head of worldwide marketing, said iPhone sales were increasing at such a fast rate that executives began short-handing their math. “Each new generation sold approximately equal to all previous generations combined,” Schiller once said while testifying in court. Of course, the question then was how much bigger Apple could grow. (The answer, we know today, was multiples more.)

Just as the smartphone revolution powered Apple's rise, artificial intelligence seems to be powering NVIDIA's rise. It's already one of the most highly valued companies in the world, which is why its "booming" sales report this week for the quarter ended April 27 makes the chipmaker seem like it's having an iPhone-like moment.

The company reported sales up 69% from the previous year, despite economic uncertainty around import tariffs that threw businesses and the stock market into a rollercoaster of emotion. That was also on top of export controls that limited NVIDIA selling its most popular chips to Chinese buyers, an unmet demand that the company said represented $2.5 billion in lost sales.

Still, the company says demand from customers including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google continues to grow. "We are witnessing a sharp jump in inference demand," NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang told investors on a conference call, referring to the scale and computing power AI technology needs because even more people and organizations are using it.

And just like with Apple before, market watchers are wondering how much further NVIDIA will grow. 

[Note: There's also a gold-plated Jensen-signed Asus Astral RTX 5090 Dhahab Edition GPU on display at the new Micro Center Santa Clara store right now, currently on display before heading to a charity auction.]

Meta's AI hits 1 billion

Just as NVIDIA is talking about demand for its chips, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that his company's Meta AI has 1 billion active users across Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. It's not hard to imagine why, either.

People have been switching to AI so suddenly, that it's forcing Google to upend the very search service that powers its profits, making its AI Mode search chatbot broadly available.

Meta's been taking that idea a step further, inserting chatbot conversation starters in people's feeds. So, if you're scrolling and suddenly see a video of a baby chick being born, Meta's AI might add a button below with questions like "How long do chickens take to hatch?" Or "How do I start raising chickens of my own?"

AI coming for starter jobs

Graduation season is here, and that means many people will be swapping their notebooks and student IDs for internships and starter jobs. But new research from job movement tracker SignalFire found that big tech companies appeared to recruit 25% fewer recent graduates in 2024 than they did in 2023, and that now new graduates represent just 7% of hires. The data wasn't much better with startups, either.

The reason? I know you know already, but it's worth reading the quote anyway.

"As budgets tighten and AI capabilities increase, companies are reducing their investment in new grad opportunities," SignalFire wrote in its report. "Even top computer science grads aren’t spared. As demand for junior roles declines, even highly credentialed engineering grads are struggling to break into tech, especially at the Big Tech companies."

Teachers going old school to beat AI

AI use in schools seems to be surging, with reports regularly detailing how students and teachers are fighting about whether using AI should be considered cheating.

While the battles play out, Axios reports that some teachers have turned to in-person oral and written exams to assess their students. Others are reportedly exploring ideas like asking students to draft papers in Google Docs so they can "see the brainstorming and writing process."

Because regardless of how much people are using AI in school, the real question is whether they're still learning. and how to best assess that they are.

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Ian Sherr is a widely published journalist who's covered nearly every major tech company from Apple to Netflix, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and more for CBS News, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and CNET. Aside from writing, he tinkers with tech at home, is a longtime fencer -- the kind with swords -- and began woodworking during the pandemic.