By Max A. Cherney and Stephen Nellis
(Reuters) -AI to better train robots and cars, as well as new gaming chips, dominated Nvidia (NASDAQ 🙂) CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at the CES 2025 conference on Monday, as the second-most valuable company of the world exposed its potential to expand its business.
Nvidia unveiled what it calls ‘fundamental’ Cosmos models that generate photorealistic videos that can be used to train robots and self-driving cars at a much lower cost than using conventional data.
By creating what is known in the tech industry as “synthetic” training data, the models can help robots and cars understand the physical world in ways similar to the way large language models helped chatbots understand. generate responses in natural language.
Users will be able to give Cosmos a text description that can be used to generate videos of a world that obeys the laws of physics.
This promises to be much cheaper than collecting data as is done today. To train autonomous vehicles, for example, companies have fleets of vehicles that roam the streets to collect data, and humanoid robots are often trained by having real humans repeat tasks over and over again.
Huang, however, cautioned that the Cosmos models will need a lot more data before reaching their “ChatGPT moment.”
Cosmos will be available under an “open license,” similar to Meta Platforms’ (NASDAQ:) Llama3 language models that have been widely used in the tech industry.
“We really hope that (Cosmos) does for the world of robotics and industrial AI what Lama3 has done for enterprise AI,” Huang said.
New gaming chips use Nvidia’s ‘Blackwell’ AI technology to give video games movie-like graphics, especially in a field known as ‘shaders’, which can help make images like a ceramic teapot look more realistic by adding blemishes and fingerprint smudges to their surface. .
The new chips also have artificial intelligence technology to help game developers generate more accurate human faces, an area where gamers tend to notice even slightly unrealistic features. The chips, which Nvidia calls its RTX 50 series, will be priced between $549 and $1,999, with top models arriving on January 30 and lower-tier models arriving in February.
Nvidia said its $549 mid-range gaming chips will match the company’s previous flagship chip, the RTX 4090, which sold for $1,600.
Nvidia also said toyota Motor (NYSE:) will use its Orin chips and automotive operating system to power advanced driver assistance in several models. He did not give details about the models.
Huang expects automotive hardware and software revenue of $5 billion in fiscal 2026, up from $4 billion expected this year.
Huang also showed off a desktop computer called Project DIGITS. The computer will feature the same chip at the heart of the company’s data center offerings, but combined with a central processor built with the help of Taiwan’s MediaTek.
The chips will come in a smaller package that individual software developers will be able to use to test their AI systems quickly.
Project DIGITS’ initial system won’t exactly be consumer-friendly: It will run a Linux-based Nvidia operating system, which is primarily used by computer programmers rather than consumers, and will cost $3,000.
CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, will take place January 7-10 in Las Vegas.
Nvidia shares closed at an all-time high of $149.43 on Monday, raising its valuation to $3.66 trillion and making it the world’s second most valuable public company behind Apple (NASDAQ:).