Nvidia's Robot Ducks Stole Berlin and 20,000 Preordered
By Daniel Rao, TechPulse USA — covering the companies, models, and money moves shaping artificial intelligence. We read the fine print so you don't have to. The most important product launch at Nvidia's GTC Berlin keynote last week was not a chip. It was not a server rack, a model, or a partnership slide with too many logos on it. It was four ducks, each about as tall as a wine bottle, waddling around on a stage in Berlin while the most powerful man in artificial intelligence tried to get them to behave. One of them spent the finale facing the wrong way. By the next day, 20,000 people had preordered one. That sentence should embarrass everyone who writes about technology for a living, present company included. We spend our days solemnly tracking parameter counts and interconnect speeds, and then a $399 robot duck that falls over on command outsells the entire discourse. But the Microduck story is not really about a cute toy. It is about what happens when the hardest proble...