CES is tech’s great three-ring circus, sprawling and fluorescent.
Three rings is, of course, a spectacular understatement. There are always a couple big acts (this year, Nvidia and Delta, the latter flanked by Lenny Kravitz), while companies hold dozens of press conferences opening with instrumental versions of pop songs like Dua Lipa’s “Levitating.” Thousands of exhibitor sideshows spring up featuring new TVs that look like old TVs, wearables tracking blood rushes to the head, and John Deere’s just-announced robot lawnmowers. (Aren’t all lawnmowers technically robots? Is this a grass-shaving, job-stealing Roomba?)
The Consumer Technology Association serves as invisible ringmaster, every year pitching this honking, multi-venue tent, where a distorted reality unfurls. It’s not that what you see at CES isn’t real, it’s just that it’s hard to tell what’s enduring. When you get that TV into the hands of customers, will it stay there? Will that wearable be discarded or treasured? CES is filled with fun house mirrors—what you see is the shape of something that exists, but the form it’ll take in the real world over time is achingly unclear.
I don’t mean this all as an insult, by the way, but rather as a statement of aesthetic fact. On the Las Vegas Strip, the fate of everything—from tech conferences to Guy Fieri-branded restaurants and the nightmare-fuel New York, New York roller coaster—is to become a carnival attraction.
With nine hours of holiday jet lag weighing on the front of my skull, I’m processing Sin City’s sensory overload and the first wave of CES news through my own peculiar lens. Light is confusing and diffuse, and interacting with others is a heightened agony, because if you’re me, you have the nagging sense you’re about to say something irretrievably weird. And I question my perspective on what’s weird and what’s normal as I sit inside the indoor convention center writing this and a pigeon bops across the tile floor, into a Dunkin’ Express.
And it is all a matter of perspective. CES is filled with announcements that could be small or could be world-changing: Toyota is doubling down on Japan’s space industry and its futuristic city is ready for tenants, Siemens is partnering with next-gen airline company JetZero as it pursues industrial AI, and Samsung and LG’s deluge of AI-branded TVs. And AI is, predictably, everywhere.
Perhaps I’m getting the all-you-can-eat buffet version of what it feels like to be a VC? A conveyor belt of flashy novelties all screaming for your attention and claiming to be game-changers. (As far as my capital goes though, most of my investments here will be made at the blackjack table.)
Nvidia banners are omnipresent, heralding the presence of tech’s hottest attraction, Jensen Huang. The leather-jacket wearing chip boss embodies the ultimate aspirational tech fever dream—the founder, who became a public company CEO, who became an icon. (At CES, among other things, Huang and Nvidia unveiled a new set of gaming cards, a new superchip, and its plans around physical AI. The company’s stock soared in the lead-up to the keynote.)
Looking at the Nvidia banners and the deluge of gadgets floating around, it seems fair to say: Tech and Vegas are both worlds rife with optical illusion. CES is expansive, but it’s also devoted to applied technology—what we see as a use case today, right now. When it comes to long-term change, products are fundamentally a proxy for underlying technology, right? Sure, I still buy books on Amazon, but that’s far from why the company has remade the world. Nvidia is a case in point: Huang was considered crazy for investing billions in CUDA, the project that would eventually underpin Nvidia’s AI dominance but was criticized as being “just for video games.”
To wit, the odd trick of CES is that we don’t actually know what’s asinine and what’s real, even with use cases and gadgets right in front of us. Every year, we show up by the thousands anyway, ready for the show.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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