Michael M. Santiago
Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang previewed what he sees as the next wave of generative artificial intelligence, physical ai, at the SIGGRAPH conference in Denver on Monday.
“The first wave was accelerated computing, which reduces the amount of energy used,” Huang said. The next wave of ai was enterprise ai: customer service. We want to give every organization the opportunity to create their own ai.”
“The next wave is physical ai,” he added. “You need three computers: one to create the ai, one to send commands to a robot, and a third computer to run it all.”
“We are entering the era of ai-powered humanoid robots,” a voice said during a video presentation on physical ai.
Nvidia revealed in detail how it is accelerating the development of humanoid robotics at the conference. New offerings include Nvidia NIM and OSMO NIM microservices and frameworks for running multi-stage robotic workloads.
Additionally, the NIM MimicGen microservice “generates synthetic motion data based on teleoperated data recorded from spatial computing devices such as Apple (AAPL) Vision Pro,” according to Nvidia. “The NIM Robocasa microservice generates robot tasks and simulation-ready environments in ai-for-robotics-industrial-digitalization-markets” target=”_blank”>OpenUSDa universal framework for development and collaboration within 3D worlds.”
Several microservices are already available in preview, with more coming soon, Nvidia said.
Earlier in the conversation, Huang revealed an ai-powered customer service agent. It contains knowledge from human customer service agents and visually interacts with customers, even making facial changes appropriate to the tone of the conversation.
WIRED senior journalist Lauren Goode questioned the ethics of using an ai customer service agent that actually looks human.
“It's still pretty robotic, and that's not a terrible thing,” Huang said. “We've made this digital human technology realistic, but we still know it's a robot… This could help someone who's lonely, someone who's elderly. Having someone who's much more human than a text box is a good thing.”
Huang painted a picture of a world where people in all kinds of industries have their own personal AIs that have learned to act and respond similarly to their human tutor. Huang said he imagines creating an ai version of himself built on a collection of everything he's ever said or written that could generate responses nearly identical to his own.
He wants every employee in his company to have their own ai assistant.
“Nvidia's latest designs would not be possible without ai,” Huang said. “Without ai, there would be no Hopper or Blackwell. The concept is that digital ai can improve every single job in the company.”
“We invent tools here,” he added. “We create tools to do bigger and better work, to do things we couldn't do before.”
