Jensen Huang, the Nvidia AI platform, and other AI offerings for humanoid robots and self-driving cars

Nvidia has been one of the largest beneficiaries of the AI boom. Its stock price skyrocketed over the past few years as tech companies clamored to buy vast quantities of the advanced hardware chips it produces, a crucial ingredient for developing cutting-edge AI. The company has proven adept at making hardware and software optimized for AI, and its product roadmap has become an important signal of where the industry is expected to head next.

Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, announced the new system, along with several other AI offerings, during a keynote speech today at CES, an annual confab for the computer industry held in Las Vegas (you can check out all of the biggest announcements on the WIRED CES live blog).

“Placing an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student empowers them to engage and shape the age of AI,” Huang said in a statement released ahead of his keynote.

It will be easier for researchers and people with little knowledge of artificial intelligence to experiment with models that are close to basic capabilities in their offices or homes. The best versions of the proprietary models are most likely larger and more powerful than anything Digits could handle, which is why they’re housed inside giant data centers owned by Microsoft and Google.

Nvidia hopes that Cosmos and Isaac will appeal to companies looking to build and use humanoid robots. Jensen was joined on stage at CES by life-sized images of 14 different humanoid robots developed by companies including Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Agility, and Figure.

Nvidia also announced software designed to help different kinds of robots learn to perform new tasks more efficiently. The new feature is part of Nvidia’s existing Isaac robot simulation platform that will allow robot builders to take a small number of examples of a desired task, like grasping a particular object, and generate large amounts of synthetic training data.

Nvidia announced today it’s releasing a family of foundational AI models called Cosmos that can be used to train humanoids, industrial robots, and self-driving cars. While language models learn to generate text by training on thousands of books, articles, and social media posts, the creators of Cosmos wanted to create 2D and 3D models of the physical world.