Jensen Huang says Nvidia is a ‘technology company’ but it’s really an AI company

As emphasized by CEO Jensen Huang, Nvidia is a “technology company” and not a “consumer” or “enterprise” company. What exactly does he mean? Nvidia doesn’t want consumers to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on new, expensive products RTX 50 series GPUs? Don’t they want more companies to buy AI training chips? Nvidia is the kind of company with many fingers in many pies. To hear Huang tell it, if the crust of these pies is the company’s chips, then AI is the filling.

“Our technology impact will affect the future of consumer platforms,” ​​Huang — dressed in his typical black jacket and hot on the heels of AI hype — said in a Q&A with reporters a day after CES opened. But how does a company like Nvidia finance it all? these epic AI experiments? H100 AI training chips It’s what made Nvidia such a tech powerhouse with over the past two years a few stumbles along the way. But Amazon and other companies are trying to create alternatives to break Nvidia’s monopoly. What must happen if the competition cuts short the frenzy?

“We will respond to customers wherever they are,” Huang said. Part of this is helping companies build “agent AI,” AKA multiple AI models, that can perform complex tasks. It includes several AI toolkits designed to throw businesses a bone. The H100 made Nvidia big, and while RTX keeps gamers coming back, it wants a new one. $3,000 Project Digits AI processing center opening up a “whole new universe” to those who can use it. Who will use it? Nvidia said it’s a tool for researchers, scientists, and perhaps students — or at least those who found $3,000 on the $1.50 cup of instant ramen they ate for lunch on the fifth night in a row.

Nvidia make sure you know About RTX 5090’s 3,352 TOPS AI performance. Later, Huang’s company released details on several software initiatives, both gaming and non-gaming related. None of his declarations were more confusing than his “world foundation” AI models. These models should be able to train autonomous vehicles or robots in real-life environments that can be used to navigate the environment. That’s a lot of future technology, and Huang admitted that he couldn’t have expressed it better in front of a crowd that came to see more cool new GPUs.

“(The world foundation model) understands things like friction, inertia, grip, object presence and elements, geometric and spatial understanding,” he said. “You know, the stuff kids know. They understand the physical world in a way that language models do not.”

Huang opened CES 2025 on Jan. 6 with a keynote that filled the Michelob Ultra arena at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay casino. Sure, there was a large portion of gamers who came to see the latest RTX 50 series cards, but mostly they were there to see how a profitable company like Nvidia is moving forward. RTX and Project Digits drew screams and shouts from the crowd. The audience, who spent half the time talking about his world foundation model, didn’t seem too keen.

It hints at how awkward AI messaging can be, especially for a company that owes much of its popularity to a discerning population of PC gamers. There’s been so much talk about AI that it’s easy to forget that Nvidia was in the game before ChatGPT hit the scene. Nvidia’s in-game AI-enhancing technology, DLSS, has been constantly improving for nearly six years, and although it’s limited by its exclusivity to Nvidia cards, it’s now one of the best AI developers in games. It was well before the advent of generative AI. Now Nvidia promises that Transformer models will further improve upscaling and beam reconstruction.

Moreover, the announced multi-frame gen can deliver four times the performance for 50-series GPUs, at least if the game supports it. This is a boon for those who can afford the new RTX 50 series. The RTX 5090 costs $2,000. The gamers who benefit the most from the framework gene are those who can only afford low-end GPUs. Huang declined to give any hints about the RTX 5050 or 5060, joking: “We’ve announced four cards and you want more?”

The world foundation model is just a prototype, like most of Nvidia’s new AI software that’s been shown to the public. The real questions are when will it be ready for primetime and who will use it? Nvidia showed up weird AI NPCs, in-game chatbots, AI nursesand one audio generator last year. This year, he wants to flourish with the world foundation model, plus many others AI “microservices”, including a quirky animated talking head that should serve as your computer’s always-on assistant. Maybe some of these will stick. Where Nvidia hopes AI will replace nurses or audio engineers, we hope it doesn’t happen.

Huang considers Nvidia a “small company” with 32,000 employees worldwide. Yes, that’s less than half of Meta’s staff, but you can’t underestimate it in terms of market impact for AI training chips. Due to its position in the market, it has a huge impact on the technology industry. The more people use AI, the more people need to buy its AI-specific GPUs and other AI software. Everyone gets their own AI processing chip at homethey don’t have to rely on external data centers and external chatbots. Nvidia, like every other tech company, just needs to find a use for AI except to replace all our jobs.