Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang envisions a future where artificial intelligence surpasses ‘agentic A.I.’ and becomes ‘physical A.I.’, capable of interacting directly with the real world.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Predicts the Next Big Thing After ‘Agentic A.I.’.
A.I. agents may be all the rage right now, but Nvidia (NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang is already looking beyond the hype. According to Huang, A.I.’s next phase will be ‘physical A.I.,’ which refers to systems that can interact directly with the real world and encompass products like autonomous vehicles and robots.
Nvidia is a multinational technology company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem.
The company specializes in designing graphics processing units (GPUs) for the gaming and professional markets.
Nvidia's GPUs are used in various applications, including gaming consoles, supercomputers, and artificial intelligence systems.
According to a report by Statista, Nvidia held 83% of the discrete GPU market share in 2020.
The company has also expanded into fields such as autonomous vehicles and data centers.
The Shift from Agentic A.I. to Physical A.I.
‘Now is the beginning of the agentic A.I. era…then there’s physical A.I. after that,’ Huang told analysts during Nvidia’s fourth-quarter earnings call yesterday (Feb. 26). He emphasized that physical A.I. systems must not only understand the meaning of words and languages but also grasp the meaning of the world, including concepts like ‘friction’ and ‘inertia’, object permanence, and cause and effect.
Nvidia’s Cosmos Platform: Advancing Physical A.I.
To support the development of physical A.I., Nvidia unveiled its ‘world models‘ platform, known as Cosmos, in January. This platform aims to simulate real-world environments, allowing for more realistic testing and training of physical A.I. systems. For instance, self-driving cars could be tested across various simulated weather conditions, while robotics companies could examine the safety of their products in different scenarios.
Adoption and Partnerships
Cosmos has already been adopted by several prominent robotics and autonomous vehicle companies, including 1X, Neura Robotics, Waabi, and Wayve. Additionally, Nvidia is working with Uber (UBER) as it explores robotaxi products. ‘Just as language foundation models have revolutionized language A.I., Cosmos is a physical A.I. to revolutionize robotics,’ said Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer.
The Rise of World Models
The concept of ‘world models’ is gaining traction in the A.I. community. Last year, Fei-Fei Li, a renowned computer scientist and leading figure in A.I. research, founded World Labs, which seeks to infuse A.I. with ‘spatial intelligence‘ that understands and interacts with the real world. The startup raised $230 million last year and unveiled an early glimpse of its progress in generating virtual 3D scenes from 2D images.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a renowned computer scientist and educator who has made significant contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
As the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), she oversees research in areas such as deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.
Dr. Li also co-founded the AI4ALL initiative, which aims to increase diversity and inclusion in AI education.
She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Nvidia’s Physical A.I. Dreams
While Nvidia is currently thriving in the agentic A.I. era, with a quarterly revenue surge of 78 percent year-over-year to $39.3 billion, its physical A.I. dreams remain a relatively small part of its business. However, Huang believes that this share will rise in the future, stating that ‘someday, there will be 1 billion cars on the road, and every single one of those cars will be robotic cars.‘
