Nvidia’s annual software developer conference, GTC, is in full swing. With its latest announcements, the company is doing all it can to assure investors of its dominance in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence industry. On Tuesday, CEO Jensen Huang delivered a keynote address in front of a packed hockey stadium in San Jose, California.
He noted how he believes that humanoid robots are less than five years away from wide use in manufacturing facilities. In this regard, he unveiled software tools that would reportedly help humanoid robots navigate the world more easily. Huang talked about humanoid robots when asked what signs would show that AI had become ubiquitous.
Huang said it may be “when, literally, humanoid robots are wandering around, which is not five years away. This is not five-years-away problem, this is a few-years-away problem.”
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Huang asserted that the manufacturing industry is probably going to be the first to adopt humanoid robots. This is because it has well-defined tasks that robots can easily handle in a controlled environment.
“I think it ought to go to factories first. And the reason for that is because the domain is much more guard-railed, and the use case is much more specific. The value of it is very, very easy to determine. The going rate for renting a human robot is probably $100,000 and I think it’s pretty good economics.”
The chipmaker’s CEO reportedly has big plans for the AI data center industry too. Debuting silicon photonics networking systems, Huang noted that their Spectrum-X and Quantum-X photonics can join hundreds and even thousands of GPUs, enabling data center companies to deploy up to 1 million GPU clusters.
Huang further noted how those million cluster data centers will be connected to other million-dollar data centers nearby to form massive data center facilities.
“Over the next several years, we’re going to be building giant AI factories. Not normal AI factories … ones you see from space.”
The GTC keynote also talked about the company’s latest advancements, from Spectrum-X and Quantum-X photonics to Blackwell Ultra and Vera Rubin Superchips, which are going to help customers operate powerful AI systems to drive better revenue opportunities.
“AI factories are directly related to revenue, and if the throughput is not good, your revenue is hurt. If you don’t have enough capacity, your revenue is hurt. If you’re not producing something of great value … your revenue is hurt.”
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10. SoundHound AI, Inc. (NASDAQ:SOUN)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 21
SoundHound AI, Inc. (NASDAQ:SOUN) is a voice artificial intelligence company offering voice AI solutions to businesses. On March 19, the company announced an expanded collaboration with NVIDIA to help businesses deploy more responsive and cost-efficient AI solutions. SoundHound will be integrating its world-class voice AI technology with NVIDIA NIM and NeMo microservices, part of the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform, to help reduce response times and improve the accuracy of AI interactions.
This in turn allows the company to enhance its AI-powered offerings across industries, including automotive, restaurant, and customer service. SoundHound’s integration of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software is already being deployed in automotive AI, particularly Lucid’s voice AI system.
“The AI industry has made massive strides in model training over the last two years, but the real challenge now is deploying these models at scale efficiently. Our collaboration with NVIDIA on NIM and NeMo microservices is solving this problem, helping us optimize inference so businesses and consumers can benefit from faster, more accurate, and highly scalable voice AI.”
-Keyvan Mohajer, CEO and Co-Founder of SoundHound AI.
9. International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM)
Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 60
International Business Machines Corporation (NYSE:IBM) is a multinational technology company and a pioneer in artificial intelligence, offering AI consulting services and a suite of AI software products. On March 19, the company announced its collaboration with Finastra, a global provider of financial services software applications, to enable it to provide seamless digital lending solutions to its customers.
IBM is offering design and implementation for LCS, Finastra’s Lending Cloud Service (LCS), to enable the efficient handling of the new platform. IBM will do so by leveraging its generative AI for enterprise platform, watsonx. The Lending Cloud Service is delivered on Microsoft Azure. Besides design and implementation, the company will also offer ongoing services to Finastra’s LCS clients in North America and Europe to help expand its business.
“The global banking community is increasingly recognizing the imperative of leveraging exponential technologies, such as generative AI, the flexibility, resilience and security of hybrid cloud, and the exceptional access a robust ecosystem can deliver. The combination of these elements is a truly powerful competitive advantage. IBM is pleased to collaborate with Finastra on its modernized Lending Cloud Service, leveraging Microsoft Azure, which delivers a valuable offering, that provides greater value, automation, resiliency and generative AI powered insights and actions to its corporate clients.”
-Shanker Ramamurthy, Global Managing Partner Banking & Financial Markets at IBM Consulting.