Why NVIDIA Matters For The Future Of AI
Last week, two prominent leaders in the world of tech made some remarkable statements about AI. Bill Gates recently wrote: “AI is the most important technological advance in decades.” Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, in his keynote at their developer’s conference last week, said that, “AI is having its iPhone moment”, referring to the incredible impact the iPhone has had on the tech industry as a whole and for creating a handheld computer for the masses.
Although AI has been around for decades, ChatGPT has made it more relative to everyone, and we are in the early stages of seeing AI’s dramatic impact on all of our futures.
After Jensen Huang’s keynote, Ben Thompson of Stratechery interviewed Mr. Huang about his iPhone moment comment. Mr. Huang stated, “I think we were all surprised by how effective ChatGPT was in both its ease of use as well as incredible capability. Almost immediately after the ripples of ChatGPT around the world, cloud service providers and software vendors in all these different industries started to ask the question, what does it mean to them? The combination of both of those things, and they were both independently surprising I guess, but it happened very fast. It’s not as if transformers weren’t developing and getting larger and larger, and it wasn’t as if the innovation wasn’t done in plain sight, but it was the ChatGPT moment when it all came together. The user interface was incredible. It was fine-tuned to produce incredible results, and it was all of that that came together in a flashpoint and because it went around the world literally instantaneously, the ripples, the reverberation around it from every industry, happened very quickly.”
NVIDIA’s role in AI was amplified during the developer’s conference as Mr. Huang rolled out multiple powerful CPUs, GPUs, high-performance computing platforms, and software designed to power many of the back-end systems that will deliver AI apps, solutions, and services.
NVIDIA announced several new products and services at GTC 2023 to expand the applications enabled by GPUs, improve GPU performance and make GPU computing more accessible. These included the DGX Cloud AI supercomputing service, the AI Foundations services for custom generative AI applications, the L4 and H100 NVL specialized GPUs, and the Omniverse Cloud platform-as-a-service. The company also disclosed more details about its Arm-based Grace and Grace Hopper Chips and said it had begun production for its BlueField-3 data processing unit.
CRN did a great piece that outlined the eight major announcements from NVIDIA’s developer conference and is worth reviewing for more details on these offerings-8 Big Announcements At NVIDIA’s GTC 2023: From Generative AI Services to New GPUs | CRN. However, one of the more critical things NVIDIA launched was its DGX cloud service offerings.
Why is this such a big deal for NVIDIA?
NVIDIA, on the whole, is a semiconductor company. They provide CPUs, GPUs, and software development platforms for accelerated computing solutions.
Now, with their DGX cloud and AI Enterprise solutions, they have an additional business service that delivers recurring revenue and, in the process, provides a supercomputer as a service to deliver AI to any business. This service would allow any company to deploy AI functionality and capabilities for whatever they offer. It supports multiple deployment options, such as on-premise, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud. It provides enterprise-grade support services when using NVIDIA platforms in the cloud. And it accelerates the data science pipeline and streamlines the development and deployment of predictive AI models.
Beyond giving NVIDIA new recurring revenue, what is most significant is that the DGX cloud as a service will provide enterprises quick access to tools and infrastructure needed to train deep learning models. They combine NVIDIA’s DGX supercomputers and AI software through a web browser hosted by cloud providers.
This new service includes access to NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a software suite of additional frameworks, pre-trained models, and tools to help a company deploy AI more effectively.
I have followed NVIDIA since it began. I was one of the analysts invited to meet with Jensen and NVIDIA founders just after it launched. At first, NVIDIA’s focus was on graphics cards and advanced graphics. However, due to Jensen Huang’s vision and technical prowess, NVIDIA has evolved into what can only be called a semiconductor powerhouse.
Their role of integrating the tools to help power enterprises’ AI capabilities into their product or services as a HAAS and SAAS model is significant for NVIDIA and their customers and will help businesses integrate AI into their products faster.
