Nvidia presents new ‘AI superchip’

Nvidia sees the system called Blackwell as “powering a new industrial revolution” through AI. The system is four times more powerful than the current generation of Grace Hopper when it comes to training artificial intelligence.

Nvidia’s computing systems dominate AI training in data centers. The group also wants to expand its role in generating content using artificial intelligence. The “Blackwell” system is 30 times better than “Hopper,” Huang emphasized Monday at the internal GTC developer conference in San Jose. Nvidia also has new software for this that can also be used via interfaces via the cloud.

Huang was confident that in the future, most content will not be prefabricated from storage, but AI software will freshly generate it based on the current situation. Nvidia has developed the computing system for this future. For example, you can talk to buildings via a chatbot instead of looking at data somewhere.

Nvidia is working on ‘Earth 2’

With Grace Hopper, for example, the chatbot ChatGPT could have been trained in three months with 8,000 Nvidia chips and a power consumption of 15 megawatts, Huang said. With Blackwell you can do this in the same time with 2000 chips and 4 megawatts of electricity.

ChatGPT is the chatbot from the developer company OpenAI, which caused the current hype around artificial intelligence more than a year ago. Such software is trained with enormous amounts of information and can use it as a basis to, for example, generate human language-level sentences and images from text specifications. Nvidia also wants to use the technology to generate weather forecasts, Huang said. For this purpose, the group is developing a world simulation called “Earth 2”.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon want to use Blackwell

Nvidia bundles its chips for Maxwell in computer systems with around 600,000 components and a weight of more than 1.3 tons, Huang emphasizes. Nvidia technologies originally developed for graphics cards have long proven themselves in computing for artificial intelligence applications. Competitors such as Intel and AMD have so far failed to catch up. This allows Nvidia’s activities – and its stock market value – to grow rapidly. Major AI companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are already planning to use Blackwell.

Nvidia’s new “AI superchip” is named after American mathematician David Blackwell. Nvidia also wants to promote the use of so-called ‘digital twins’, where companies can simulate their entire business operations on the computer. In the future, before you build something in the real world, you will first simulate it digitally, Huang emphasizes.

Nvidia brings Omniverse to Apple Glasses

With this concept, Nvidia also makes Apple’s Vision Pro computer glasses more suitable for use in companies. Nvidia’s 3D environment Omniverse, which allows companies to create a ‘digital twin’ of their products and factories, is coming to the Apple device. The technology is often used in the design of objects.

Huang demonstrated it on Monday at its own GTC developer conference, with the help of South Korean car manufacturer Hyundai, among others. This meant that a designer could look at different color variants of a car model in different environments – and also be virtually behind the wheel. With the $3,499 Vision Pro, Apple wants to create a so-called ‘spatial computer’ that can also display digital content within the real environment.

Nvidia also relies on robots. “Everything that moves will be robotic,” the company boss said. The goal is for robots to learn by simply observing people. “The ChatGPT moment for robotics may be just around the corner,” says Huang. Simulations in which robots learn for the real world must play a central role.

(sda/dpa)