AI and Beyond: Insights From NVIDIA Special Address at CES 2024
NVIDIA announced three new graphics cards, advancements in in-game NPC dev and robotics, and partnerships across healthcare and intelligent automotive.
- Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor and AI hardware major NVIDIA held a Special Address at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024.
- The company announced multiple new products and entered into several important partnerships.
NVIDIA’s revenue ballooned to $18.12 billion in Q3 fiscal 2024, up 206% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) and 34% from Q2 2024 as AI fuels the growth machine that the company has become. And it doesn’t look like the cash registers will stop ringing anytime soon, nor will the innovation cease at NVIDIA.
However, the company says not all things are AI this time around (only most of them are). The NVIDIA Special Address at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2024 was reserved for consumer tech, accompanied by multiple partnerships and advancements in robotics.
As such, NVIDIA showed off a host of new offerings at the grand event in Las Vegas, Nevada, though not everything it has in store as the company’s flagship event approaches in March. Expect the company to share its latest full-stack tech offerings, including those for cloud and on-premise AI/ML development, at NVIDIA GTC 2024.
NVIDIA’s Special Address at CES 2024 also followed AMD’s Advance AI showcase, leaving one to wonder if the American chipmaker is almost trying to one-up its fellow American counterpart, just as it did in terms of revenue in just the past year.
Look at NVIDIA’s key announcements at its Special Address at CES 2024.
NVIDIA Special Address Key Announcements
1. New graphics cards
As expected, NVIDIA introduced three new additions to its GeForce RTX 40 series: the GeForce RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4070 Super, all of which are primarily gaming-oriented but are also being marketed as AI chips.
Having successfully conquered the cloud-based AI market, NVIDIA now seems set to test the AI PC space. Given the two companies’ collaboration, Microsoft should emerge as the biggest buyer of NVIDIA’s AI chips for its Surface line of laptops.
All three graphics cards are positioned a notch below the RTX 4090D, which caters to the Chinese market.
AI-powered Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)The three cards offer almost twice the performance of their predecessors, thanks to the company’s in-house Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech. Tech specs for the new hardware remain under wraps for now.
GeForce RTX 4080 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, and RTX 4070 Super cost $999, $799, and $599, respectively, and will be available to purchase in January. Compared to the $1,199 price tag for RTX 4080, RTX 4080 Super’s higher performance should make it an attractive prospect.
2. AI-driven NPC advancements
At CES 2024, NVIDIA demoed the latest advancement in the creation of and dynamic interaction with non-player characters (NPCs). At the heart of the new demonstration is of course, generative AI, NVIDIA’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE), Audio2Face facial animation, and the company’s partnership with Convai.
AI algorithms, alongside a complex rendering process involving speech recognition of a player through Riva, conversion to text, processing by a large-language model (in the cloud), and reconversion to audio fed to the game and thus to the player via the NPC.
It is unclear how efficient the entire process is, especially in the context of online gaming.
Nevertheless, the company announced NVIDIA ACE and the entire NPC development process would be available as Ace Production Microservices only to partners. Some of the earliest studios to harness NVIDIA’s new offering are Ubisoft, Tencent, NetEase, Inworld, Ourpalm, Charisma, UneeQ, and Convai.
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3. NVIDIA Isaac
NVIDIA is complementing its commercial and enterprise AI offerings with one for industrial applications. With NVIDIA Isaac and Jetson, the American chipmaker hopes to leverage generative AI for robotics.
The company outlined its two-brain approach to AI-based robotics involving two computers. The first, called AI factory, leverages NVIDIA’s compute infrastructure and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms to simulate and train AI models.
The second one is designed to handle the robot’s runtime environment.
The company highlighted that incorporated LLMs allow for a seamless experience for even a beginner. More than 1.2 million developers and 10,000 customers and partners rely on the two platforms.
4. Important NVIDIA partnerships
NVIDIA’s new partnerships span multiple sectors, although two stand out.
Automotive sector: NVIDIA has partnered with four automakers who will leverage the company’s AI tech stack to design intelligent driving systems. These include Li Auto, Great Wall Motor, Zeekr, and smartphone maker Xiaomi’s EV segment.
While Li Auto has signed up to adopt NVIDIA DRIVE Thor, the other three companies will use DRIVE Thor’s predecessor, NVIDIA Drive Orin.
Healthcare sector: NVIDIA is working with biotech company Amgen to create foundational models for drug discovery. Amgen is expected to build AI models with NVIDIA’s DGX SuperPOD data platform with 31 DGX X100 nodes and 248 H100 Tensor Core GPUs deployed at its subsidiary deCODE Genetics’ headquarters in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Meanwhile, Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Insilico Medicine will rely on the BioNeMo cloud APIs (in beta) for drug discovery.
Further, NVIDIA’s partnership with Deepcell encompasses cell image analysis and multiple other AI-driven applications in cell biology.
What was your key takeaway from NVIDIA’s Special Address at CES 2024? Share with us on LinkedIn, X, or Facebook. We’d love to hear from you!
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