Nvidia’s chief executive hailed a new era of computing where “everyone is a programmer,” as the world’s most valuable semiconductor group unveiled a new supercomputer platform to stay at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.
In his first face-to-face public speech since the start of the pandemic, Jensen Huang warned that the traditional tech industry cannot keep up with advances in artificial intelligence, adding that the technology has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for computer coding.
“Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer,” Jensen Huang said in Taiwan on Monday, describing the combination of accelerated computing and generative artificial intelligence as “a reinvention from the ground up.”
“We have reached the tipping point of a new era of computing,” he added, arguing that artificial intelligence now enables individuals to create programs simply by plugging in commands.
ChatGPT can generate code and reduce the human effort required to create software, a development set that revolutionizes programming.
Jensen Huang spoke at the Computex conference in Taipei days after Nvidia unveiled forecasts for rapid sales growth, sending shares soaring and putting it on track to become the world’s first trillion-dollar semiconductor stock.
Shares of the chipmaker have risen 172% since the start of the year as the explosive growth of Open AI’s ChatGPT has awakened investor enthusiasm for generative AI.
Demand has soared for Nvidia’s data center chips, including the H100, an advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) that dramatically reduces the time it takes to train so-called large language models such as ChatGPT.
The abundance of open source software available online also provides a fertile training ground for code-generating AI systems. OpenAI’s Codex system, trained in part on open-source software, prompts software developers which lines of code to write next.
GitHub, a Microsoft service for developers, leverages Codex, saying the platform cuts the time it takes to create new code in half, an efficiency boost after a decade of mostly ineffective efforts to improve productivity. giant 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.
Huang, who was born in Taiwan, has unveiled a powerful new gaming GPU and an artificial intelligence platform for developers to create games with online avatars that mimic player behavior.
“This is the future of video games. AI will help with the rendering and compositing of environments, but it will also bring characters to life,” he said.
Nvidia also announced a partnership with Japan’s SoftBank to bring its Superchip to the technology group’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 drive advances in AI has made it a target of U.S. export controls aimed at curbing technological advances in China.
Washington last October banned exports of the A100 chip, the predecessor to the H100, to China as it expanded trade restrictions on certain blacklisted companies.
Underscoring the challenge of restricting trade in key components, the Financial Times reported that sanctioned Chinese artificial intelligence firms continued to access the A100 chips through third-party data centers.
Huang was born in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan and eventually moved 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