The Nvidia CEO has hailed a new era of computing “in which everyone is a programmer,” as the world’s most valuable semiconductor group unveils a new supercomputer platform to stay at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.
The traditional technology industry will not keep pace with the developments of artificial intelligence, Jensen Huang warned in a speech in Taiwan, adding that the technology has greatly lowered the entry barrier to computer coding.
“We have reached the tipping point in the new computing era,” Huang said Monday, noting that AI now enables individuals to create programs simply by communicating commands.
“Everyone is a programmer now. You just have to say something to the computer,” he added, describing the combination of accelerated computing and generative AI as “reinvention from the ground up.”
ChatGPT can generate code, cut off the human labor required to create software, and develop a development kit to revolutionize programming.
Huang’s speech at the Computex conference in Taipei came days after Nvidia disclosed expectations of rapid sales growth, driving up stock prices 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 from Open AI has sparked investors’ enthusiasm for generative AI.
Demand has soared for Nvidia’s data center chips, including the H100, an advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) that dramatically shortens the time needed to train so-called large language models like ChatGPT.
The vast amount of open source software available online has also provided a fertile training ground for token-generating AI systems. OpenAI’s Codex system, trained in part on open source software, presents software developers with suggestions as to which lines of code to write next.
GitHub, a service from Microsoft for developers that harnesses Codex, said the platform has cut the time it takes to generate new code in half, a huge leap in efficiency after a decade of largely ineffective efforts to boost productivity.
Huang also announced a new AI supercomputer platform called DGX GH200 to help technology companies build generative AI models similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Meta, Microsoft and Google Cloud are some of the first customers expected to reach the supercomputer.
Taiwan-born Huang has unveiled a powerful new gaming GPU and AI platform for developers to create online avatar games that mimic player behaviors.
“This is the future of video games. Artificial intelligence will contribute to the rendering and synthesis of the environment, but it will also animate the characters.”
Nvidia also announced a partnership with Japan’s SoftBank to bring its super chipsets to the country’s tech cluster data centers, as it seeks to include data center operators’ reliance on its products.
Nvidia’s success in developing products to fuel developments in artificial intelligence has put it in the crosshairs of US export controls designed to curb Chinese technological progress.
Washington banned shipments of the A100 chip – the predecessor to the H100 – to China last October as it expanded trade restrictions from specific blacklisted companies.
The Financial Times reported that sanctioned Chinese AI firms continued to access A100 chips through third-party data centers, underlining the challenge of curtailing trade in critical components.
Huang was born in the southern Taiwanese city of Tainan before eventually moving to the United States, where he co-founded Nvidia in 1993 after working as a microprocessor designer at Advanced Micro Devices.
Additional reporting by Madhumita Murgia
“Devoted student. Bacon advocate. Beer scholar. Troublemaker. Falls down a lot. Typical coffee enthusiast.”