Nvidia's breakthrough innovation, the graphics processing unit, is powering the design of humanoid robots, virtual movie sets, and the creation of protein-based drugs to fight disease.
Insatiable demand for Nvidia's GPU-powered technology used in artificial intelligence has propelled the company into the stock market stratosphere, joining Microsoft, Apple, and Google parent Alphabet as one of only four companies to ever reach the top. It became one of the US companies. The stock market is valued at $2 trillion.
Nvidia furthered its efforts in March when CEO Jensen Huang announced the company's latest GPU, Blackwell. Huang said Blackwell, designed in the United States and manufactured in Taiwan, is the fastest chip ever and is well-suited for AI.
“I hope we can do something that will surprise us,” Huang said. “That's the point.”
Nvidia's surprising start at Denny's
The futuristic Nvidia campus is located around the corner from a Denny's in the company's humble birthplace of San Jose, California. Huang, now 61, worked as a dishwasher at Denny's when he was a teenager. Thirty years ago, he started the company at a Denny's in San Jose with two friends, co-founders Chris Malachowski and Curtis Priem, dreaming up an entirely new way to process video game graphics. I decided to do so.
At the time, Huang was a 30-year-old electrician, married with two young children. He and his two Nvidia co-founders had no idea how to start a company, but went for it anyway.
Their big idea was to speed up the processing power of computers with new graphics chips. Their first attempt failed and the company nearly went bankrupt in 1996, but they were able to turn around and eventually develop a revolutionary GPU.
Just eight years after Nvidia was born at Denny's, the company joined the S&P 500. Huang then set his sights on developing software and hardware for innovative GPU-powered supercomputers, moving the company far beyond video games. What seemed like a risky bet to Wall Street was a revelation to early AI developers.
“It was a blessing of vision,” Huang said.
The technological capabilities they invented were perfect for AI researchers, he said. In 2016, Huang delivered his Nvidia AI supercomputer, the first of its kind, to Elon Musk, then a director at OpenAI, who used it to develop his Created the building blocks for ChatGPT. As AI became more popular, so did Huang's reputation.
He is now a celebrity in Silicon Valley. Huang, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan at age 9, said she never could have imagined her success.
“Bill, it's the most amazing thing that a normal dishwasher busboy can grow up to be like this,” Huang told 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker. “There's no magic. It's just 61 years of hard work every day.”
Those who work with Hwang describe him as demanding, a perfectionist, and not an easy person to work with. Huang said all of these explanations seem true to him.
“It should be,” he said. “If you want to do something extraordinary, it's not easy.”
Advances in AI with Nvidia Technology
At Nvidia's annual developer conference in March, the atmosphere wasn't just upbeat, it was downright giddy. More than 11,000 enthusiasts (software developers, tech moguls, and happy shareholders) gathered at San Jose's professional hockey arena to kick off a four-day AI extravaganza.
Huang showed off some of the things that have been made possible by AI in recent years, including the use of AI to simulate Earth's weather patterns. This will ultimately allow him to calculate and predict the weather 3,000 times faster than supercomputers, and use 1,000 times less energy. Huang said.
Cubic co-founder Pinar Seyhan Demirdag leverages Nvidia GPUs to instantly transform simple text prompts into virtual movie sets at a fraction of the cost of today's backgrounds. She said her company has received a lot of love from Hollywood.
At Generate:Biomedicines, Dr. Alex Snyder, director of research and development, uses Nvidia technology to create protein-based medicines. She was initially skeptical about her use of AI in drug development. Then she saw her lab data and changed her mind.
Now, her team is asking AI models to create proteins to fight diseases like cancer and asthma. AI produces proteins that do not exist in nature and are rigorously tested in the laboratory. A drug to defeat the coronavirus is in clinical trials.
“We're not putting Frankenstein on people,” Snyder said. “We're taking what is known and really pushing the field forward and pushing biology forward.”
Figure, a Silicon Valley startup funded by Nvidia, has developed an Nvidia GPU-powered humanoid robot. CEO Brett Adcock said the robot was designed to address labor shortages and wouldn't have been possible without Nvidia's technology.
“We think they're definitely the best in the world in this regard,” Adcock said.
Although his prototype is not yet complete, early results are so promising that German automaker BMW plans to begin testing the robot at its South Carolina factory this year. Adcock envisions a future in which billions of robots work alongside humans.
Addressing concerns about AI
Investors are bullish on Nvidia, but some are concerned that AI technology is taking the leap too far. More than 600 top AI scientists, ethicists and others signed the statement last year. urge caution, warns about the risks of AI to humanity. Some people worry that AI will take away jobs as technology advances.
“Over time, AI and robotics will start to do more and more things that humans can do, and do them better,” Adcock said.
In Huang's view, if a company's productivity increases, its profits will increase and it will be able to hire more workers.
“You still want a human[s] “We don't understand in the loop because we have good judgment, because there are situations that machines can't understand,” Huang said.
Huang believes that the future of AI is one of progress and prosperity, not one where machines are the masters. For him, AI is a revolutionary technology.
“We need artificial intelligence to explore space in places we could never do on our own,” Huang said.