An Interview with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang about Manufacturing Intelligence

It took a few moments to realize what was striking about the opening video for Nvidia's GTC conference: the complete absence of humans. That the video ended with Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, is the exception that accentuates the takeaway. On the one hand, the theme of Huang's keynote was the idea of AI creating AI via machine learning; he called the idea "intelligence manufacting": None of these capabilities were remotely possible a decade ago. Accelerated computing, at data center scale, and combined with machine learning, has sped up computing by a million-x. Accelerated computing has enabled revolutionary AI models like the transformer, and made self-supervised learning possible. AI has fundamentally changed what software can make, and how you make software. Companies are processing and refining their data, making AI software, becoming intelligence manufacturers. Their data centers are becoming AI factories. The first wave of AI learned perception and inference, like recognizing images, understanding speech, recommending a video, or an item to buy. The next wave of AI is robotics: AI planning actions. Digital robots, avatars, and physical robots will perceive, plan, and act, and just as AI frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch have become integral to AI software, Omniverse will be essential to making robotics software. Omniverse will enable the next wave of AI. We will talk about the next million-x, and other dynamics shaping our industry, this GTC. Over the past decade, Nvidia-accelerated computing delivered a million-x speed-up in AI, and started the modern AI revolution. Now AI will revolutionize all industries. The CUDA libraries, the Nvidia SDKs, are at the heart of accelerated computing. With each new SDK, new science, new applications, and new industries can tap into the power of Nvidia computing.