Nvidia stock jumps 11% after SIGGRAPH unveil: ‘next wave of AI is robotics’

We’re entering the “third wave” of AI and the era of mechanical humanoids, according to Nvidia.

Nvidia looks like a world-beater again as a slew of announcements related to the “next wave” of artificial intelligence has its market capitalization up about 11%.

Speaking at the annual Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) event in Denver, Colorado, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced several new services designed to bridge the gap between the digital and physical worlds.

Per Huang:

“The next wave of AI is robotics and one of the most exciting developments is humanoid robots. We’re advancing the entire NVIDIA robotics stack, opening access for worldwide humanoid developers and companies to use the platforms, acceleration libraries and AI models best suited for their needs.”

Robotics

The company’s big announcement at SIGGRAPH was the early-access availability of its suite of robotics development tools. These include a visual agent training ground, an AI model workflow management system, and a nifty development system that allows humans to demonstrate complex functions via teleoperation.

While the suite may seem underwhelming at first glance, these cutting-edge robotics offerings have the potential to solve some of the most challenging outstanding problems in the field.

The visual training ground, called “NIM Microservices,” allows generative AI models similar to ChatGPT or Meta’s Llama to “see” and interpret their surroundings in 3D. While vision recognition systems have been around for a while, NIM serves as a simulation-to-execution stack that, theoretically, could be adapted to just about any imaginable machine.

OSMO, the other new service, is a cloud-based orchestrator. Much like it sounds, this workflow management system handles the scheduling and distribution of training and simulation resources. This enables developers to handle multiple models with geographically distributed hardware in a single UI — something Nvidia says didn’t previously exist.

Per a company blog post, “until now, there has not been a unified platform where developers can easily submit workloads on their desired compute.”

Lastly, Nvidia showed off its new teleoperation training system at SIGGRAPH 2024 in what, in this tech reporter’s opinion, is the coolest demo we’ve seen from the company since the debut of “Thispersondoesnotexist.com” back in 2017

In the demo, researchers show a human operating a robot remotely through 1:1 movement control — whatever the person does, the robot imitates. The machine’s movements are then captured by an AI training system as data which is used to train the robot in myriad different digital environments to prepare it for real world operations. 

A robot stock bump?

With a current market capitalization of $2.833 trillion, as of the time of this article’s publication, Nvidia is up about 11% overnight, as of July 31.

Despite falling 23% between July 10 through July 30 as big tech earning’s calls failed to impress, Nvidia is, once again, breathing down Microsoft’s neck ($3.080 trillion).

Another 9% bump in market cap would put Nvidia in second and potentially in contention for Apple’s spot ($3.408 trillion) as the most valuable company in the world.

Related: EU AI Act comes into effect — Here’s what to expect