Nvidia CEO: We bet the farm on AI and no one knew it

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that the company made an existential business decision in 2018 that few realized would redefine its future and help redefine an evolving industry. It’s paid off enormously, of course, but Huang said this is only the beginning of an AI-powered near future — a future powered primarily by Nvidia hardware. Was this successful gambit lucky or smart? The answer, it seems, is “yes.”

He made these remarks and reflections during a keynote at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles. That watershed moment five years ago, Huang said, was the choice to embrace AI-powered image processing in the form of ray tracing and intelligent upscaling: RTX and DLSS, respectively. (Quotes are from my notes and may not be verbatim, some minor corrections may take place after checking the transcript.)

“We realized rasterization was reaching its limits,” he said, referring to the traditional, widely used method of rendering a 3D scene. “2018 was a ‘bet the company’ moment. It required that we reinvent the hardware, the software, the algorithms. And while we were reinventing CG with AI, we were reinventing the GPU for AI.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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