My First Trip to GTC
I've never been to a large tech conference like this and I get why they call it the "Woodstock of AI" - over 30k people gathered in downtown San Jose with lots of great conversation, tech demos, excitement and rubbing elbows with big names in tech.
A big part of my time was spent working the Google Cloud booth, where I got to meet Julia, our community Golden Ticket contest winner. Google and NVIDIA sent her to GTC with VIP passes, hotel, and flights, which was really cool to see come to life. It was a fun reminder of how impactful these kinds of high-reward community activations can be, and we’re hoping to do more of them through our joint Google X NVIDIA learning community on the Google Forums.
I also spent time demoing OpenClaw for people at our “Build a Claw” booth. I was genuinely surprised by how many people showed up to build and by the overall level of interest (check out that line below). OpenClaw really feels like one of the hottest open source projects out there right now. I think we did a great job explaining what it is and showing off some of what it can do.
One of my biggest takeaways, though, is that we need more practical case studies to demonstrate its value in action. One example I heard about that really stuck with me was an OpenClaw setup used for a junk removal business. It works almost like a dispatcher: the bot goes through Facebook Marketplace via a Chrome extension, negotiates deals on higher-value items, and then sends Telegram messages to a part-time team to help trade up those items for more money. That kind of real-world use case makes the potential feel very tangible.
I also had a chance to work the NVIDIA Developer Programs booth, which gave me another great way to meet developers and help people navigate the conference.
And on the prep side, before the event I built a spatial web app to help myself understand where everything would be at GTC. I’ll share more about that separately on my personal blog. It worked surprisingly well to help me get around day 1! Really curious what folks think of this model of playing a game prior to a big event like this to learn your way around.
My first GTC was busy, energizing, and full of great conversations. Definitely a memorable first massive tech conference!
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