On the heels of its soaring stock price and red-hot artificial intelligence boom, Nvidia on Friday announced several initiatives to further leverage AI, including a partnership to build better humanoid robots, a new Blackwell computer chip , and includes a new way to design factories. and facilities using Apple’s Vision Pro native computing platform.
The announcements came from a two-hour keynote delivered Monday by NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California.
Starting with the company’s core technology, Huang noted that AI development needs will exponentially increase the amount of data involved.
“We have to make even bigger GPUs,” he said, noting that his current Hopper line is well ahead of the unveiling of “a much, much bigger GPU.”
Named after mathematician David Blackwell, Huang said the new hardware is more than just a GPU, it’s a platform, but features the new B200 chip at its core.
“People think we make GPUs. And we do, but GPUs don’t look like they used to.
“We’re starting to do really great work in the next generation of robotics,” Huang said. “The next generation of robotics will likely be humanoid robotics; – we now have the technology necessary to envision normal humanoid robotics.”
To get there, Huang announced Project GR00T, which invokes the iconic Marvel Comics character in a background that means Generalist Robot 00 Technology. On stage, Huang presented several AI-powered robots to the audience, such as the Jetson Thor computing platform designed to perform complex tasks and interact naturally with humans.
Nvidia is developing a complete system for training humanoid robots that can learn from visual content, including videos and virtual reality, by bringing together several related divisions and projects within the chipmaker, Huang said.
“We developed Nvidia Isaac Lab to train GR00T at scale and built NVIDIA Osmo, a compute orchestration service that integrates Nvidia DGX systems for training, Nvidia OVX systems for simulation, and Nvidia IGX and Nvidia AGX systems for hardware. integrates for. in-the-loop authentication,” the company said.
The Jetson Thor is part of NVIDIA’s updates to the Isaac robotics platform, and Huang said they are training these robots for real-world adaptations in their Isaac Reinforcement Learning gym.
“In a way, human robotics is simpler,” Huang said. “That’s because we have a lot of simulated training data that we can provide to robots because that’s exactly how we’re built.” It is very possible that humanoid robotics will be very useful in our world because we have created the world to be one in which we can cooperate and work well together.
The virtual gym for training AI robotics is called Omniverse, and Huang showed off a demonstration that he called “kind of crazy, but it’s going to be very close to tomorrow.”
The demo featured a robotics building described as a “digital twin of a 100,000-square-foot warehouse” populated by autonomous systems — humans and vehicles — that interact with each other. The environment will allow rapid development of both physical plant engineering and design but will better integrate work within both humans and robots. And it’s more than theoretical.
“Siemens is the world’s largest industrial engineering and operations platform, building the Siemens Industrial Metaverse, and today we’re announcing that Siemens is connecting its crown jewel Xccelerator to the Nvidia Omniverse.”
Apple’s new Vision Pro headset is also part of the picture.
“Omniverse Cloud is streaming to Vision Pro… Vision Pro connected to Omniverse portals you into Omniverse—it’s really, really pretty amazing,” announced Huang. “And because all these CAD tools and all these different design tools are now integrated and connected to Omniverse, you can have that kind of workflow.”
The automotive industry was an obvious place to apply AI innovation, Huang said.
“Everything that moves will be robotic, there’s no question about it, it’s safer, it’s easier,” he explained. “One of the biggest industries is going to be automotive — we build the robotic stack from top to bottom, from computer systems to manufacturing in the case of self-driving cars.
Jetson Thor could be deployed in autonomous vehicles, Huang said. It will be shipped next year and will be added to Mercedes and Jaguar Land Rover vehicles, he added.
The Nvidia CEO also revealed that the company is building artificial intelligence platforms for other firms, including 1X Technologies, Agility Robotics, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, Fourier Intelligence, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics, and XPENG Robotics.
“Creating a foundation model for general humanoid robots is one of the most interesting problems to solve in AI today,” Huang said. “Enabling technologies are coming together for leading roboticists from around the world to take a giant leap toward artificial general robotics.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.