Nvidia, the New King of Keynotes
There were several interesting announcements made at Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s Keynote at CES 2025, including a new RTX 50 generation of gaming GPUs and an upcoming $3,000 Mac-Mini-sized “personal AI supercomputer” called Project Digits. But most interesting to me was the scale of the keynote itself: over 6,000 attendees in an arena at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. Just look at it: it resembled a rock concert more than a tech keynote.1
We — yours truly very much (and self-evidently) included — in the Cupertino punditocracy often bloviate about the pros and cons of Apple’s post-Covid pre-filmed keynotes versus the company’s pre-Covid live-audience keynotes. The argument in favor of the new pre-filmed format is that, no matter how big the live audience ever was (and for Apple that capped out around 5,000 for WWDC keynotes at Moscone West and the San Jose Convention Center), several orders of magnitude more people watch on video, so the format ought to be optimized for video, not a live audience.2 The pre-filmed format also lets Apple move through more topics, and bring in more presenters, more quickly. Of course everything just looks better and more polished. And because everything is pre-filmed, demos not only never fail, they never even hiccup. But you can also argue that demos in particular are a con, not a pro, of the new format — as I wrote a few months ago about a few AI demo fails at a Google event, live demos carry real drama, and as I noted in a footnote in September, I miss the drama of live Apple demos in particular.
But what struck me about the venue size and audience enthusiasm of Nvidia’s CES keynote is something much more general about live events than just the drama of live demos. There’s magic in a live audience. It just matters. Taylor Swift’s record-setting stadium-filling Eras tour was a worldwide sensation because it was a shared experience between enthusiastic fans. She’d still be insanely popular if she’d done that tour, but she’s more popular because she did. Attending a live sporting event is profoundly different than watching on TV. And as sports fans learned in 2020, watching sports on TV feels weird and flat and low-stakes if there is not a live audience present at the event.
