Nvidia’s chief executive hailed a new era of computing where “everyone is a programmer” as the world’s most valuable semiconductor group unveiled a new supercomputer platform to be at the forefront of the artificial intelligence revolution.
Jensen Huang warned in a speech in Taiwan that the traditional tech industry will not keep pace with advances in AI, saying the technology has dramatically lowered the barrier to entry to computer coding.
“Everyone is a programmer now. You have to tell the computer something,” Huang said on Monday, describing the combination of accelerated computing and generative AI as “a reinvention from the ground up.”
He added: “We have reached the tipping point of a new era of computing,” arguing that AI now enables individuals to create programs by inserting commands.
ChatGPT can generate code, reducing the human labor required to develop software, an improvement that will revolutionize programming.
Huang’s speech at the Computex conference in Taipei came days after Nvidia revealed forecasts of rapid sales growth, prompting a share price rally to become the world’s first trillion-dollar semiconductor stock.
The chipmaker’s share price has risen 172 percent since the start of the year as ChatGPT’s explosion of Open AI sparked investor interest in developing AI.
Demand for Nvidia’s data center chips, including the H100, has soared, with an advanced graphics processing unit (GPU) that significantly reduces the time it takes to train so-called large language models like ChatGPT.
Open source software available online has provided rich training for code-generating AI systems. OpenAI’s Codex system is partially trained on open source software, giving software developers suggestions on what lines of code to write next.
GitHub, a Microsoft service for developers using Codex, said the platform has cut the time it takes to create new code in half, the biggest improvement in efficiency after a decade of futile efforts to improve productivity.
Huang also announced a new AI supercomputer platform called the DGX GH200, which helps tech companies build production AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Among the first customers expected to access the supercomputer are Meta, Microsoft and Google Cloud.
Born in Taiwan, Huang created a new powerful GPU for gaming and an AI platform for developers to create games that mimic players’ behaviors with online avatars.
“This is the future of video games. AI will contribute to the rendering and composition of the environment, but it will also bring the characters to life,” he said.
Nvidia also announced a partnership with Japan’s SoftBank to bring its superchip to the tech group’s data centers in the country as it seeks to instill confidence in its products by data center operators.
Nvidia’s success in developing AI-enhanced products has put it in the crosshairs of U.S. export restrictions designed to limit Chinese technological progress.
Last October, Washington banned exports to China of the A100 chip, a precursor to the H100, as it expanded trade restrictions on certain blacklisted companies.
The Financial Times reported that Chinese AI companies under sanctions continued to access A100 chips through third-party data centers, underscoring the challenge of reducing 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
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