AdminNvidia participates in ChatGPT.
During the company’s keynote address at GTC 2023 on Tuesday, March 21, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted the acceleration of the company’s focus on AI, which Nvidia hopes to bring to every industry imaginable.
“The warp drive engine is accelerated computation, and the power source is artificial intelligence” Huang said during the speech (opens in a new tab). “The impressive capabilities of generative AI have made companies feel an urgent need to re-imagine their products and business models.”
The 78-minute keynote was heavily enterprise focused, with almost the entire event devoted to talking about cloud computing and server technology such as Grace’s new server-grade processor. But there has been talk of more consumer-centric products like ChatGPT, the viral model of the big language that everyone uses to do everything from scripting specs to doing homework and even taking law exams.
ChatGPT is especially important for AI, which Nvidia invests heavily in, as its introduction is truly a turning point for AI entering the mainstream. “We’re in the iPhone AI moment,” Huang said.
Nvidia’s position in the artificial intelligence market
Nvidia’s focus on AI and ChatGPT may come as a surprise to many as Nvidia itself doesn’t release any major language models, but Nvidia’s technology ultimately underlies all of them.
Nvidia’s GPU architecture includes advanced tensor cores that are necessary for machine learning data processing and adversarial generative techniques used to create images via stable diffusion and text via ChatGPT.
Given the expected increase in commercial use of this technology in the coming years, Nvidia is cleverly putting itself at the center of it all, as it is truly the only CPU manufacturer with the tensor core technology necessary for the generative AI task, to the point of having an effective monopoly on the technology.
What this means for other areas of Nvidia’s business, such as creating the best graphics cards in the world for gamers, remains to be seen, but given the market pressure on artificial intelligence, it is possible that Nvidia is slowly withdrawing from the consumer market almost completely and focusing server-level hardware, leaving consumer GPUs to AMD and Intel.
This is obviously not good news for gamers, as one less choice for a GPU is always a downgrade, but Nvidia has yet to say what its future plans are, so all remains to be seen.
