Nvidia chief Jensen Huang says AI is creating a ‘new computing era’

Nvidia’s chief executive hailed a new era of computing in which “everyone is a programmer”, as the world’s most valuable semiconductor conglomerate unveiled a new supercomputer platform to be at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.

In his first personal public address since the start of the pandemic, Jensen Huang warned that the traditional tech industry will not keep pace with AI advances, saying the technology has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry in computer coding .

“Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer,” Huang said in Taiwan on Monday, describing the combination of accelerated computing and generative AI as “reinvention from the ground up.”

He said: “We have reached the tipping point of a new computing era,” arguing that AI now enables individuals to create programs by simply plugging in commands.

ChatGPT can generate code, reducing the human labor needed to create software, a development set to revolutionize programming.

Huang’s speech at the Computex conference in Taipei came days after Nvidia revealed forecasts of rapid sales growth, driving a rise in share price that put it on track to become the world’s first trillion-dollar semiconductor stock.

The chipmaker’s share price is up 172 percent since the start of the year as ChatGPT’s explosion of open AI fueled investor enthusiasm for generative AI.

Demand has soared for Nvidia’s data center chips, which include the H100, an advanced graphics processor unit (GPU) that significantly reduces the time needed to train so-called large language models such as ChatGPT.

The vast amount of open-source software available online has also provided a fertile training ground for code-generating AI systems. OpenAI’s Codex system, partly trained on open-source software, suggests software developers which lines of code to write next.

GitHub, a Microsoft service for developers that uses Codex, said the platform has halved the time it takes to create new code, after a decade of largely ineffective efforts to increase productivity. a big leap.

Huang also announced a new AI supercomputer platform called the DGX GH200 to help tech companies build generative AI models, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Meta, Microsoft and Google Cloud are among the first customers expected to have access to the supercomputer.

Taiwan-born Huang unveiled a powerful new GPU for gaming and an AI platform for developers to create games with online avatars that mimic players’ behavior.

“This is the future of video games. AI will contribute to the rendering and synthesis of the environment, but it will also animate the characters,” he said.

Nvidia also announced a tie-up with Japan’s SoftBank to bring its super chips to the tech conglomerate’s data centers in the country, as it seeks to embed data center operators’ reliance on its products.

Nvidia’s success in developing products to power advances in AI has put it in the crosshairs of US export controls designed to stifle Chinese technological progress.

Washington last October banned shipments of the A100 chip – the H100’s predecessor – to China as it widened trade sanctions from specific blacklisted companies.

The Financial Times reported that Chinese AI companies had continued to access A100 chips through third-party data centers under the sanctions, underscoring the challenge of reducing trade of critical components.

Huang was born in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan, before eventually moving to the US, where he co-founded Nvidia in 1993 after working as a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices.

Additional reporting by Madhumita Murgia