Nvidia, the world’s leading graphics processing unit (GPU) manufacturer, has made a bold prediction in their recent earnings call. According to CEO Jensen Huang, within the next decade, the company will boost the power of their AI-accelerating hardware by a factor of one million for the second time in a decade.
Huang explained that Nvidia’s GPUs had already boosted AI processing performance by a factor of one million in the last ten years, something Moore’s Law could only have achieved by 100x in the same time frame. This breakthrough allowed for the development of state-of-the-art language models like ChatGPT.
The company aims to achieve this second million-fold increase by introducing new chips, interconnects, systems, operating systems, distributed computing algorithms, and AI algorithms while working closely with developers to create new models. These developments will be the cornerstone of the new industry of AI factories Huang predicted would emerge worldwide.
“I expect to see AI factories all over the world,” Huang explained. “There will be some that are large, and there are some that will be mega-large, and then there’ll be some that are smaller.”
As impressive as Nvidia’s performance boost claims may be, it is difficult to measure these performance increases. Nonetheless, the result of the boost will likely be AI models with processing power that is one million times more powerful than the best examples of AI models in existence today, such as ChatGPT.
With these new developments, the world may see massive breakthroughs in AI platforms in the next decade, as well as the rise of AI factories all around the globe. This will allow for the production of soft goods, which are essentially intelligent machines, much like manufacturing of physical goods.
Huang believes the potential of the AI industry will only continue to grow as its adoption rate increases. “There was a time when people manufactured just physical goods. In the future, almost every company will manufacture soft goods. It just happens to be in the form of intelligence,” Huang said.
While the idea of conscious AI may sound like science fiction, the exponential growth of the technology is undeniable. With Nvidia’s prediction of a million-fold performance increase in the next decade, it is possible that the world could witness a significant shift towards intelligent machines and the rise of AI factories.
As Huang himself acknowledged, “My expectation is that you’re going to see really gigantic breakthroughs in AI models in the next decade, but simultaneously, because of the incredible growth and adoption of this, you’re going to see these AI factories everywhere.”
