March 20, 2024: Nvidia, the US chipmaker with a market value of over $2 trillion, has extended its lead in the artificial intelligence sector with the announcement of several groundbreaking technologies at its annual developer conference on Monday.
The company unveiled the “Blackwell” series of AI chips, designed to power the expensive datacentres that train cutting-edge AI models such as the latest generations of GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
The Blackwell B200 chip is a significant upgrade over Nvidia’s previous H100 AI chip, reducing the number of chips and power required to train a massive AI model like GPT-4 by 75%.
The company also introduced the GB200 “superchip,” which combines two B200 chips and Nvidia’s Grace CPU on a single board, offering “30x the performance” for server farms that run chatbots like Claude or ChatGPT, while reducing energy consumption by up to 25 times.
LLM inference and energy efficiency
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang showcased even larger configurations, such as the GB200 NVL72, a single server rack with 72 B200 chips connected by nearly two miles of cabling, and the DGX Superpod, which combines eight of these racks into a shipping-container-sized AI datacentre in a box.
In addition to the new AI chips, Nvidia announced Project GR00T, a foundation model for controlling humanoid robots.
This model, paired with the Jetson Thor system-on-a-chip, aims to create autonomous machines that can be instructed using natural language to carry out general tasks, even those they haven’t been specifically trained for.
“Project GR00T will help robots understand natural language and emulate movements by observing human actions – quickly learning coordination, dexterity, and other skills in order to navigate, adapt, and interact with the real world,” Huang explained.
Nvidia also entered the quantum computing sector with the introduction of a cloud service that uses its AI chips to simulate quantum computers.
While the service will not initially be connected to a real quantum computer, it will allow researchers to test their ideas without the expense of accessing rare and costly quantum hardware.
In the future, Nvidia plans to provide access to third-party quantum computers through the platform.
As Nvidia continues to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence and robotics, the company’s latest innovations showcase its commitment to leading the industry and shaping the future of these transformative technologies.