Nvidia unveils'reasoning' AI technology for self-driving cars Nvidia boss Jensen Huang on Monday announced Alpamayo, a tech platform the company says will help self-driving cars think like humans. Alpamayo brings reasoning to autonomous vehicles, allowing them to think through rare scenarios, drive safely in complex environments, and explain their driving decisions, Huang said on stage at the annual CES technology conference in Las Vegas. Huang also said Nvidia has begun producing a driverless car powered by its technology, the Mercedes-Benz CLA, in partnership with the German automaker. The vehicle will be released in the US in the coming months before being rolled out in Europe and Asia. Wearing his trademark black leather jacket, Huang told an audience of hundreds that the project has taught Nvidia an enormous amount about how to help partners build robotic systems. Analysts say the announcement reinforces Nvidia's leadership in integrating AI hardware and software, deepening its push into physical AI.

GTC--NVIDIA today announced an expanded set of generative AI cloud services for customizing AI foundation models to accelerate the creation of new proteins and therapeutics, as well as research in the fields of genomics, chemistry, biology and molecular dynamics. Part of NVIDIA AI Foundations, the new BioNeMo Cloud service offering -- for both AI model training and inference -- accelerates the most time-consuming and costly stages of drug discovery. It enables researchers to fine-tune generative AI applications on their own proprietary data, and to run AI model inference directly in a web browser or through new cloud application programming interfaces (APIs) that easily integrate into existing applications. "The transformative power of generative AI holds enormous promise for the life science and pharmaceutical industries," said Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA. "NVIDIA's long collaboration with pioneers in the field has led to the development of BioNeMo Cloud Service, which is already serving as an AI drug discovery laboratory. It provides pretrained models and allows customization of models with proprietary data that serve every stage of the drug-discovery pipeline, helping researchers identify the right target, design molecules and proteins, and predict their interactions in the body to develop the best drug candidate."

On the occasion of the upcoming GTC, I had the opportunity of speaking with two very important people that work every day at innovating XR at NVIDIA: David Weinstein, Director of Virtual and Augmented Reality, and Gregory Jones, Director of Global Business Development/Product Management. I had an interesting chat with them about NVIDIA's vision for the future, they also clarified to me what NVIDIA Omniverse is, and when 5G cloud streaming can become reality. As a full disclaimer, this is a paid article that I'm writing for a recent collaboration I started with NVIDIA to help them promote GTC, NVIDIA's flagship event, that this year will be held online on March 21st-24nd. You know me well, so you know that if I accepted a similar collaboration it is only because NVIDIA guaranteed me that it could be valuable for you, my readers. And in fact, this post is so full of interesting information that it doesn't look like a paid one at all This collaboration also lets me offer you one special bonus: if you live in the EMEA area (Europe, Middle East, Africa), if you register for the GTC event using my referral code https://www.nvidia.com/gtc/?ncid The graphics card will be extracted from all those who used my referral to register and who then followed at least one session during the event (the keynote does not count and just registering is not enough). I have not millions of followers, so the odds of winning aren't bad: it can be worth trying You can discover more about the GTC and some of its cool XR sessions in the remainder of this article.

A new piece of software developed by American tech company, NVIDIA, uses deep-learning to elevate even the roughest sketches into works of art. The new program, dubbed GauGAN, after famous French impressionist Paul Gaugin, uses a tool called generative adversarial networks (GAN) to interpret simple lines and convert them into hyper-realistic images. Its application could help professionals across a range of disciplines such as architecture and urban planning render images and visualizations faster and with greater accuracy, according to the company. A new piece of software developed by American tech company, NVIDIA, uses deep-learning to elevate even the roughest sketches into works of art. Simple shapes become mountains and lakes with just a stroke of what NVIDIA calls a'smart paintbrush' Artificial intelligence systems rely on neural networks, which try to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn.

As the need for more powerful processors in the emerging self-driving and semi-autonomous car grows, NVIDIA is making sure it stays ahead of the trend. At CES, the GPU-building powerhouse unveiled the Xavier SOC for AI car systems the company announced at last year's CES. The Xavier has over 9 billion transistors with a custom 8-core CPU, a 512-core Volta GPU, an 8K HDR video processor, a deep-learning accelerator and new computer-vision accelerators. NVIDIA says the SOC can perform 30 trillion operations per second using only 30 watts of power. NVIDIA says that's 15 times more efficient than the previous architecture.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled an ambitious new processor for artificial intelligence applications, the Tesla V100. The new chip has 21 billion transistors, and it is an order of magnitude more powerful than the 15-billion transistor Pascal-based processor that Nvidia announced a year ago. It is a huge chip -- 815 square millimeters, or about as big as an Apple Watch face. It has 5,120 CUDA processing cores, and it performs at 7.5 FP64 teraflops. The performance is about three times as fast as last year's product.

NVIDIA's Shield TV was one of the few successful Android TV devices -- it was both a capable 4K entertainment device and a simple way to bring PC gaming into your living room. So it only made sense that NVIDIA had a sequel in the works. Today during his CES 2017 keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang unveiled a new version of the Shield TV -- now just called Shield -- which will support 4K HDR for both games and movies. Among other new features, the new Shield TV is also the first Android TV device to support Google Assistant. As you'd imagine, Google Assistant works just like it does on the company's Home device and Pixel phones, but you can also command it to play media on the Shield TV.