Unique Research · Insight · July 30, 2024 · SIGGRAPH, Denver
On Monday at SIGGRAPH in Denver, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sketched what he sees as genAI’s next wave — physical AI.
“The first wave was accelerated computing — it cut energy use.” Next: enterprise customer service — “we want every organization to create its own AI.” Then physical AI: “it needs three computers working together — one to create the AI, one to send instructions to the robot, and one to integrate and manage the system.” A demo voice: “We are entering the era of AI-driven humanoid robots.”
Humanoid stack
Nvidia detailed acceleration plans: NVIDIA NIM and OSMO NIM microservices for multi-stage robot workloads; MimicGen NIM — synthetic motion from teleop (e.g. Apple Vision Pro) spatial recordings; Robocasa NIM — robot tasks and sim-ready environments in OpenUSD. Several microservices in trial; more coming.
Digital CS agents — and ethics
Earlier: an AI customer-service agent with domain knowledge, visual interaction, and facial response to tone. Wired’s Lauren Goode pressed ethics of human-looking agents. Huang: “It’s still quite robotic — and that’s not a bad thing. We’ve made digital humans realistic, but we still know it’s a robot… It can help lonely elderly. A presence more human than a text box is a good thing.”
Vision: personal AI tutors per person — even an AI of Huang trained on everything he’s said/written; every Nvidia employee with an assistant. “Without AI, Nvidia’s latest designs wouldn’t be possible… no Hopper or Blackwell.” “We invent tools here — to do more powerful, better work we couldn’t do before.”