Jensen Huang says Nvidia is a “technology company,” but it’s actually an artificial intelligence company

Nvidia is a “technology company,” not a “consumer” or “enterprise” company, as CEO Jensen Huang has emphasized. What does it mean exactly? Doesn’t Nvidia want consumers to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on expensive new hardware? RTX 50 series GPUs? Don’t they want more companies to buy AI training chips? Nvidia is the kind of company that has a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. To hear Huang tell it, if the crust of those pies is the company’s chips, then the AI ​​is the filling.

“Our technological influence will impact the future of consumer platforms,” Huang, wearing his typical black jacket and warm embrace of the AI ​​hype, said in a Q&A with reporters a day after his opening remarks at CES. But how does a company like Nvidia finance everything? Those epic AI experiments? H100 AI training chips Nvidia has made it such a technical powerhouse During the past two years, with A few hiccups All the way. But Amazon and other companies are trying to find alternatives to stop Nvidia’s monopoly. What should happen if competition stops this wave?

“We will respond to customers wherever they are,” Huang said. Part of that is helping companies build “agent AI,” also known as multiple AI models capable of completing complex tasks. This includes several AI toolkits designed to support businesses. Even though the H100 made Nvidia big, and RTX keeps gamers coming back, it wants new “Project Digits” AI processing center worth $3,000 To open a “whole new world” to those who can use it. Who will use it? Nvidia said it’s a tool for researchers, scientists and perhaps students — or at least those who find $3,000 on the $1.50 cup of instant ramen they eat for dinner for the fifth night in a row.

Nvidia I made sure you knew About the AI ​​performance of 3,352 being the highest performance of the RTX 5090. Next, Huang dropped details about several software initiatives, both gaming-related and non-gaming-related. None of his statements were more confusing than the “universal core” AI models. These models should be able to be trained in real-life environments, which can be used to help autonomous vehicles or robots navigate their environment. It’s a lot of futuristic technology, and Huang admitted he failed to explain it better to an audience who mostly came to see the cool new GPUs.

“(The Universal Foundation Model) understands things like friction, inertia, grip, the presence of objects, elements, and geometric and spatial understanding,” he said. “You know the things that babies know. They understand the physical world in a way that language models don’t.

Huang opened CES 2025 on January 6 with a keynote that packed the Michelob Ultra Arena at the Mandalay Bay Casino in Las Vegas. Sure, there was a large portion of gamers who came to see the latest RTX 50 series cards in the flesh, but there was more to see how a profitable company like Nvidia is moving forward. The RTX and Project Digits elicited hoots and hoots from the audience. He spent half his time talking about his global enterprise model, and the audience didn’t seem nearly as enthusiastic.

It’s indicative of how difficult it is to message AI, especially for a company that holds so much of its popularity among the PC gaming demographic. There’s been so much talk about AI that it’s easy to forget that Nvidia was in this game years before ChatGPT came on the scene. Nvidia’s in-game AI upscaling technology DLSS has been around for nearly six years, is getting better all the time, and is now one of the best AI upscaling tools in gaming, though it’s limited by its exclusivity to Nvidia cards. It was good before the advent of generative AI. Now, Nvidia promises that the Transformer models will further enhance the upgrade and rebuild rays.

Moreover, the described multi-frame generation can give four times the performance of 50-series GPUs, at least if the game supports it. This is a boon for those who can afford the new RTX 50 series. The RTX 5090 is priced at $2,000. Gamers who will benefit most from frame generation are those who can only afford a lower GPU cost. Huang declined to give any hints about the RTX 5050 or 5060, jokingly saying, “We announced four cards, do you want more?”

The global foundation model is just a prototype, just like much of Nvidia’s new AI software shown to the public. The real questions are: When will it be ready for primetime use, and who will ultimately use it? Nvidia showed off NPCs with strange AI, In-game chatbots, Artificial intelligence nursesand Sound generator last year. This year, she wants to thrive with her global enterprise model, as well as a range of… “Microservices” for artificial intelligence Including a weird moving talking head that’s supposed to serve as your computer’s ever-present sidekick. Perhaps, some of these will remain. In cases where Nvidia hopes AI will replace nurses or audio engineers, we hope it doesn’t.

Huang considers Nvidia a “small company” with 32,000 employees worldwide. Yes, that’s less than half the headcount Meta has, but you can’t consider it small in terms of the market impact on AI training chips. Due to its market position, it has a significant influence on the technology industry. The more people use AI, the more people will need to buy AI GPUs, as well as any other AI software. If everyone buys their own Artificial intelligence processing chip at homeThey don’t have to rely on external data centers and external chatbots. Nvidia, just like any tech company, needs to find a use for AI After replacing all our jobs.