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Only 16 years after Nvidia released CUDA

I remember chatting with some Nvidia rep at CES 2008. He showed me how cuda could be used to accelerate video upscale and encoding. I was 19 at the time and just a hobbyist. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.

(And yes I "snuck" in to CES using a fake business card to get my badge)

Back in the day, using CUDA was really hard. It got better as more people built on it and it got battle tested.

It's still not exactly easy, and the API has not changed much since the aughts except than to become richer and more complicated. But almost nobody writes raw CUDA anymore. It's abstracted away beneath many layers of libraries, e.g. Flax -> Jax -> lax -> XLA -> CUDA.

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