Nvidia Corporation, the undisputed king of advanced chips that now drive artificial intelligence (AI) applications, is launching a new tool that lets owners of its latest graphics cards run an AI-powered chatbot offline on a PC Windows.
The tool, called ‘Chat with RTX‘, will allow users to customize a generative AI (GenAI) model based on ChatGPT or Google‘s Bard by linking it to files, documents and notes that they can then query.
“Rather than searching through notes or saved content, users can simply enter queries,” Nvidia said in a blog post Tuesday. “For example, we could ask: “What restaurant does my partner recommend in Las Vegas?” » and Chat with RTX will scan the local files the user points it to and provide the pop-up response.
Nvidia’s chatbot campaign comes at a time when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is seeking billions of dollars in investment to revamp the global semiconductor industry, The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Altman, who founded the startup that launched ChatGPT, the fastest-growing consumer software application in history, has repeatedly expressed concern about the supply and demand problem with AI chips which, he said, limits OpenAI’s growth.
Altman is currently in talks with several investors for a project that could increase global chip manufacturing capacity, according to the WSJ report.
These announcements are seen as indicating the direction that the discourse on generative AI could take in the future. It could also indicate a gradual blurring of the lines between the two most important players in AI history, and the likely intersection of interests of those currently on opposite sides of the hardware-software divide.
The Nvidia advantage
The AI generation boom has been the main reason for the growing demand for specialized chips of the type made by Nvidia. Graphics processing units (GPUs) – the advanced chips that were previously intended for gaming applications but now drive AI applications – have the computing power and operational efficiency to run the calculations that enable companies working on extended language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. or Bard to chew through huge volumes of data.
Nvidia Corp has seen its valuation rise since the LLM boom and is now swamped with orders that it is struggling to deliver. The pioneering graphics chip maker is already one of the most valuable companies in the world, riding on its dominance in the gaming sector and now, the AI space and the potential of generative AI to reshape the sector technological.
Analysts say Nvidia is ahead in the AI chip race thanks to its proprietary software this makes it easier to leverage the GPU’s full hardware capabilities for AI applications. It also has the systems to back up the processors and the software that runs them all, making it a complete solutions company.
Nvidia also offers an application program interface (API) – which is a set of instructions for different applications to communicate with each other – called CUDA, which allows the creation of parallel programs using GPUs and is deployed on supercomputing sites around the world.
Altman’s Opportunity
Although Chat with RTX is considered a very early stage product that will evolve in due course, Nvidia’s indispensable nature to the future of AI is clearly recognized. Nvidia currently controls over 80% of the AI chip market and has a market capitalization of over $1.70 trillion, significantly higher than its well-known Silicon Valley competitors such as Intel and AMD.
High demand for chips to fuel the rush toward generative AI also means Nvidia will struggle to meet GPU demand for the foreseeable future. And that’s one of the apparent reasons for Altman’s angst. Another factor could be the fact that Nvidia is now a prominent investor, alongside Jeff Bezos, in Perplexity AI, one of the most promising GenAI startups looking to challenge incumbents like OpenAI.
Altman will need to raise between $5 trillion and $7 trillion for his project, the WSJ reported, citing a source.
On Wednesday, Altman posted on X that OpenAI believes “the world needs more AI infrastructure – fabulous capacity, energy, data centers, etc.” – than what people are currently planning to build.” He also said that “building large-scale AI infrastructure and a resilient supply chain is crucial for economic competitiveness,” and that OpenAI would “try to help.”
Altman has always been interested in chipmaking, and just before his controversial ouster as CEO of OpenAI, he was reportedly spearheading a new chip company named Tigris to take on Nvidia directly. Earlier in 2018, Altman invested some of his own money to back an AI chip startup called Rain Neuromorphics.
