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Live from GTC: Building AI on Ubuntu with Jack Cavanaugh of Canonical
00:05:09
What if your entire AI stack, from edge device to data center, ran on one seamless open-source foundation? Logan chats with Jack Cavanaugh of Canonical to unpack how open source is powering the next wave of AI development.
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Reshaping Workflows with Dell Pro Precision and Nvidia, where innovation meets real world impact in high performance computing.
- [00:20]
B
Welcome back. This is Logan live from GTC Reshaping Workflows 2026. I'm here with Jack Kavanaugh who ironically enough is working on the Dell account and I'm interviewing. So it works out really well. But I won't steal his thunder. Jack, before we get started, give everyone a little bit of background. What do you do at Canonical?
- [00:37]
A
Yeah, so I work at Canonical as the Dell alliance manager. I help drive joint go to market with Dell. So largely focused on data centers, building software stacks on top of Dell products for a better together solution.
- [00:52]
B
Better together, my favorite word. So you're at gtc, you've been here before. What is new for Canonical at GTC this year? Any new announcements and any new products, any new additional capabilities? Tell us what's new for this year at GTC for Canonical.
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A
Yeah, so we have a long standing and existing partnership with Nvidia kind of across the architecture stack that they have. So new for this year, we have relationships building on the devices side of things. So the Jetson line of products, we are building optimized images with Ubuntu for that platform as well as continued development on the data center side of things. Optimizing Ubuntu as an operating system to run across the Nvidia line of products. Enabling and further enabling DGX and IGX as an operating system. Just providing a clean open source environment on which people can develop and build on top of Nvidia hardware.
- [01:46]
B
So that's interesting. So on like kind of the Jetson and Thor, right? I mean obviously that being new, I did not know that. Maybe go a little bit deeper into what that means, you know what was kind of done before, was it running, you know, not Canonical? Like why, why Canonical on the Jetson stores and those like kind of Edge robotics devices now versus before?
- [02:04]
A
Yeah. So in the past Nvidia had focused on using Jetpack as the the platform to develop on Jetson through our existing partnership. Like I mentioned, we came into the devices side of things with Jetson, Thor and Orin to provide the operating system layer of things to a just provide a more cohesive, fully built out solution. We as a company look at ourselves as the experts in open source, experts in Linux operating system, have a whole devices division within our company focusing on devices, edge devices. And so we can come in with Nvidia to jointly create a platform that's easy to develop. On integrated with all the Nvidia drivers and just provides a platform which people can use familiar open source tooling and infrastructure and build a end user application or a product that is just a very cohesive open source solution.
- [02:59]
B
Lovely. And we'll wrap it up with kind of your sweet spot. Right, With Ubuntu AI development data science work, it's been kind of the gold standard for how many ever years now. Right. But you know, a lot of people we have on the podcast that are listeners are, you know, are technical, but we have a lot of IT dms. Right. Like not saying that they aren't super aware, but like at the end of the day there's some differences within Ubuntu. Right, but like the free, the paid version maybe give like a brief overview. If there's an IT person out there, they have people starting to do some AI development work. Why should they be on canonical on those end user devices?
- [03:32]
A
Yeah, definitely. So as a company we make Ubuntu, we give it away for free for five years. That's kind of our claim to fame. Beyond that we have a whole ecosystem of open source products from that developer client side PC desktop environment, all the way up to large scale infrastructure where we are deploying, managing Kubernetes at scale, managing private clouds at scale, all based on Ubuntu as the os, using Ubuntu as the VM using Ubuntu containers. So what we can provide to customers is an environment that they're used to with open source software and applications, but provided by an enterprise. So you can call us if you have issues with any of your integrations, any issues with the os, any issues with the Kubernetes layer of things. And we can also provide a very high end managed services for large scale environments, all in a cohesive offering from an enterprise. You're not looking out into the open source, finding solutions that may or may not be integrated. Just a really cohesive open source environment that you can build on.
- [04:34]
B
I love it. So you heard it here first. If you're not on Ubuntu, guess what? You probably should be. We'll see you on the next one.
- [04:48]
A
Do what you want. Do what you want. Do it. Do what you want. Do what you want. This podcast was produced in partnership with Amaze Media Labs.