Nvidia Corp., world’s most valuable chipmaker, Monday unveiled a new batch of products and services tied to artificial intelligence (AI), looking to further capitalise on the frenzy. The lineup includes a new robotics system, gaming capabilities, advertising services and a networking technology.
Unvaling the AI supercomputer platform called DGX GH200, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said companies can use to ride a historic wave of generative AI that’s transforming industries from advertising to manufacturing to telecom.
The platform is suppose help tech companies create successors to ChatGPT. Microsoft Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are expected to be among the first users of this platform.
“We have reached the tipping point of a new computing era,” Huang said, as he paced the stage in a trademark leather jacket.
The Nvidia CEO said the traditional architecture of the tech industry is no longer improving fast enough to keep up with complex computing tasks. To realize the full potential of AI, customers are increasingly turning to accelerated computing and graphics processing units, or GPUs, like those made by the company.
He also showed off the mind-bending capabilities of generative AI to take inputs in the form of words and then put out other media. He asked for music to match the mood of early morning and laid out a handful of lyrics and then used AI to transform the idea into a bouncy pop tune.
The Nvidia CEO showed how the company is teaming up with WPP Plc to use AI and the metaverse to lower the cost of producing advertising. It’s releasing a networking offering that’s designed to turbocharge the speed of information within data centres. The company is even looking to change how people interact with video games: A service called Nvidia ACE for Games will use AI to enliven background characters and give them more personality.
He also unveiled a new robotics platform that he said is aimed at helping Nvidia expanding to industries beyond tech.
A New Engine for Enterprise AI
The wide-ranging new lineup includes an AI supercomputer platform called DGX GH200, which will help tech companies create successors to ChatGPT, Huang told the audience at the Computex show in Taiwan.
It uses NVIDIA NVLink to combine up to 256 NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips into a single data-center-sized GPU.
The GH200 Superchip, which Jensen said is now in full production, combines an energy-efficient NVIDIA Grace CPU with a high-performance NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU in one superchip.
Huang said the DGX computer is another attempt to keep data center operators hooked on Nvidia’s products.
Microsoft, Google and their peers are all racing to develop services similar to OpenAI Inc.’s ChatGPT chatbot — and that requires plenty of computing horsepower. To satisfy this appetite, Nvidia is both offering equipment for data centers and building its own supercomputers that customers can use. That includes two new supercomputers in Taiwan, the company said.
AI Speeds Assembly Lines
Huang said one of the biggest AI bottlenecks is the speed at which data moves within data centers. Nvidia’s Spectrum X, a networking system that uses technology acquired in the 2020 purchase of Mellanox Technologies, will address that issue. The company is building a data center in Israel to demonstrate how effective it is, Huang added.
The WPP partnership, meanwhile, will streamline the creation of advertising content. The WPP will use Nvidia’s Omniverse technology to create “virtual twins” of products that can be manipulated to customize ads and reduce the need for costly reshoots.
Bringing Game Characters to Life
Nvidia’s original business was selling graphics cards to gamers, and it is returning to that world with the Avatar cloud engine (ACE) offering. The service will address the problem of NPCs, or nonplayer characters, the background figures that populate video games. NPCs typically give repetitive responses with scripted dialogue.
Nvidia ACE will listen to what the gamer says to a character, convert into text and then dump that into a generative AI program to create a more natural, off-the-cuff response. The Santa Clara, California-based company is currently testing the service and will add guardrails to ensure that responses aren’t inappropriate or offensive.
Nvidia ACE will listen to what the gamer says to a character, convert into text and then dump that into a generative AI programme to create a more natural, off-the-cuff response. The company is currently testing the service and will add guardrails to ensure that responses aren’t inappropriate or offensive.
Nvidia’s share price has witnessed a sharp rally of more than 24 per cent since last Thursday, and the firm is now commanding a market capitalisation (Mcap) of $963.18 billion – extending the company’s lead as the world’s most valuable chipmaker and Wall Street’s fifth-most-valuable company.
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Updated: 30 May 2023, 12:15 AM IST
