Here’s some of what one of the most influential people in IT had to say at CES.
CES was a big event this year. It’s a big event every year, but this year we saw some really eye-opening news on advancements in AI, and hardware in particular.
You don’t have to look very far to see analysts and others talking about Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at the event, where Huang took viewers inside Nvidia’s “digital twin” to show them so much of what’s happening within the enterprise.
I wanted to take the time to cover his remarks and his presentation, as we go through interesting times, and tackle hard challenges like the wildfires scraping parts of the country (I have friends dealing with this) and try to figure out where these new technologies are taking us.
Setting the Stage
One of the things that was interesting about Huang‘s presentation was that there were a lot of lists, starting with this lengthy screed introducing him onto the stage, a soliloquy about tokens that sounded almost biblical:
“Tokens have opened a new frontier, the first step into an extraordinary world where endless possibilities are born. Tokens transform words into knowledge, and breathe life into images. They turn ideas into videos, and help us safely navigate any environment. Tokens teach robots to move like the masters.
They inspire new ways to celebrate our victories, and give us peace of mind when we need it most.
They bring meaning to numbers to help us better understand the world around us. They help us to predict the dangers that surround us, and find cures for the threats within us. Tokens can bring our visions to life and restore what we’ve lost. They help us move forward one small step at a time, and one giant leap, together.”
In addition, Huang inspired the crowds with metrics around items like Nvidia’s RTX Blackwell GPUs, and a ‘Project Digits’ AI supercomputer, which he said is still in the early stages.
Here are some of his recited specs on RTX Blackwell: 4000 AI TOPS, 380 Ray tracing teraflops, 125 shader teraflops, 92 billion transistors, G7 memory, 1.8 TB per second memory bandwidth, and an AI management processor.
In general, we talked about the ubiquity of AI, and the advent of test time scaling, which is going to make all of these applications much more powerful.
He talked about the swirling hyperprojections of AI capabilities, and how they contrast to traditional rules like Moore’s law, where Gordon Moore originally noticed the doubling of transistors on a circuit annually.
“Test time scaling is going to go through the roof,” he said, predicting low future costs of inference, and snowballing capability where multi-agent systems are going to work together to provide real-time results. (What it reminded me of, partly, was a phone call I got yesterday, where at the end of the call I had to ask the other party if they were a person or a computer, and I was surprised by the result. This is something brand new in our experience that illustrates how these applications are moving toward us, and at what pace.
Detailing processes like semantic search, Huang showcase the types of agentic possibilities that are going to springboard both horizontal and vertical AI applications.
What’s Next?
In his trajectory of AI, he puts test time scaling and agentic AI before an eventual result called ‘physical’ AI, presumably where we’re going to have mobile robots utilizing all of these agentic models.
He also made the interesting prediction that all human resources departments are going to be automated within a few years – so, robots will be handling your payroll.
And then there’s the pace of generative AI:
“What’s really amazing is that now … the internet is producing about twice the amount of data every single year as it did the last year,” Huang said. “I think that in the next couple of years, humanity will produce more data than all of humanity has ever produced since the beginning.”
Input from AI Daily Brief
I always check out the AI Daily Brief podcast, and Nathaniel Whittemore, in a recent edition, gave us his own synopsis of what Huang was talking about at the CES keynote. That comes complete with Whittemore’s description of the moment when Huang appears with the Nvidia super-chip, a colossal piece of hardware that measures at least a couple of feet in diameter, and looked like Captain America with his shield (I borrowed this from Whittemore).
More highlights include where Huang said AI agents are the new workforce, described blueprints for AI architecture, and talked about AI automating large swaths of business workflows (Whittemore cited an existing 7 trillion hours of video monitoring in enterprise, and the potential for AI oversight).
Huang (and Whittemore by proxy) also mentioned the very important partnerships that Nvidia is making with Toyota, Uber and others to advance autonomous driving, something we’ve been hearing about for decades. I wrote about the partnership with Aurora and Continental for self-driving trucks yesterday, and it ended up being on Whittemore‘s and Huang’s radars as well, unsurprisingly.
Local Initiatives
Those are some of the highlights of what Jensen Huang went over at CES. As I bicycle or drive past places like the offices of the Whitehead Initiative here in Boston, I think about how having AI supercomputers in everyone’s pocket will help all of these smart people to pursue their goals and do more with whatever they’re tackling these days. It’s an exciting time, also bringing us responsibilities that may be new to us – responsibilities to understand and harness AI tech technologies in the right ways. Keep this in mind.
