On Monday evening, Nvidia Corporation CEO Jensen Huang engaged a global audience with insights from inside one of the world's most fascinating digital twins.
Nvidia, recognized as the "world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) computing," is the inventor of the GPU and has driven advancements in high-performance computing (HPC), gaming, creative design, autonomous vehicles, and robotics.
Huang began his narrative with the MV1 chip in 1993, aiming to create computers that others couldn't—which meant integrating a game console into a personal computer (PC). Their groundbreaking architecture was known as unified device architecture (UDA).
Six years later, the introduction of the programmable GPU marked a significant leap forward, facilitating what we now consider modern computer graphics.
Thirty years later, video games have become entirely cinematic experiences. Additionally, products like CUDA helped illustrate the programmability of GPUs, enabling a wide range of algorithms to leverage their capabilities.
The pivotal moment arrived when CUDA was utilized to process AlexNet, a breakthrough that set the stage for the rapid advancement of AI.
Since then, the growth of AI has been remarkable, expanding from perception technologies (like speech recognition and medical imaging) to generative AI (applied in digital marketing and content creation), agentic AI (such as coding assistants and patient care), and physical AI (encompassing self-driving cars and general robotics).
The introduction of Google's transformers in 2018 fundamentally altered the computing landscape. In just a decade, the approach shifted from hand-coding instructions on CPUs to employing machine learning, neural networks, GPUs, and AI.
Huang remarked, "AI was not just a new application with a unique business opportunity. More importantly, machine learning, enabled by transformers, would fundamentally transform how computing operates."
Today, the paradigm of computing has evolved from manual coding and instructions that run on CPUs to software tools created by machine learning, which now generates and optimizes neural networks that operate on GPUs to develop artificial intelligence.
This shift represents an incredible transformation in just 12 years.
So, what lies ahead?
Machine learning has altered the framework for how every application will be developed, how computing will function, and the limitless possibilities that await us.