By Kyle Barr Published January 10, 2025 | Comments (1) | Photo: Artur Widak/Anadolu via Getty Images; Art: Gizmodo Nvidia is a technology company, not a consumer or enterprise company, as emphasized by CEO Jensen Huang. What does he mean, exactly? Doesnt Nvidia want consumers to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the new, expensive RTX 50-series GPUs? Dont they want more companies to buy their AI training chips? Nvidia is the kind of company with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. To hear Huang tell it, if the crust of those pies is the companys chips, then AI is the filling. Our technology influence is going to impact the future of consumer platforms, Huangclad in his typical black jacket and the warm bosom of AI hypesaid in a Q&A with reporters a day after his blowout opening CES keynote. But how does a company like Nvidia fund all those epic AI experiments? The H100 AI training chips made Nvidia such a tech powerhouse over the past two years, with a few stumbles along the way. But Amazon and other companies are trying to create alternatives to cut out Nvidias monopoly. What should happen if competition cuts the spree short? Nvidias Digits brick is barely the size of a typical mini-PC. Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo Were going to respond to customers wherever they are, Huang said. Part of that is helping companies build agentic AI, AKA multiple AI models able to complete complex tasks. That includes several AI toolkits made to throw a bone to businesses. While the H100 has made Nvidia big, and RTX keeps gamers coming back, it wants its new $3,000 Project Digits AI processing hub to open up a whole new universe for those who can use it. Who will use it? Nvidia said its a tool for researchers, scientists, and maybe studentsor at least those who stumble across $3,000 in their cup of $1.50 instant ramen theyre eating for dinner for the fifth night in a row.Nvidia made sure you knew about the RTX 5090s 3,352 TOPS of AI performance. Then, Huangs company dropped details on several software initiativesboth gaming and non-gaming related. None of his declarations were more confusing than its world foundation AI models. These models should be able to train on real-life environments, which could be used for helping autonomous vehicles or robots navigate their environment. Its a lot of future tech, and Huang admitted he failed to better articulate it to a crowd who had mostly come to see cool new GPUs.[The world foundation model] understands things like friction, inertia, grabbing, object presence, and elements, geometric and spatial understanding, he said. You know, the things that children know. They understand the physical world in a way that language models didnt know. Huang opened up CES 2025 on Jan. 6 with a keynote that packed the Michelob Ultra arena in Las Vegas Mandalay Bay casino. There was certainly a huge portion of gamers whod come to see the latest RTX 50-series cards in the flesh, but more were there to see how a company as lucrative as Nvidia moves forward. RTX and Project Digits drew hollers and shouts from the crowd. Spending half his time talking about his world foundation model, the audience didnt seem nearly as enthused. It points to how awkward AI messaging can be, especially for a company that bears much of its popularity to the attentive population of PC gamers. There has been so much talk about AI that its easy to forget Nvidia was in this game years before ChatGPT came on the scene. Nvidias in-game AI upscaling tech, DLSS, has been around for close to six years, improving all the time, and its now one of the best AI-upscalers in games, though limited by its exclusivity to Nvidias cards. It was good before the advent of generative AI. Now, Nvidia promises Transformer models will further enhance upscaling and ray reconstruction. Photo: Kyle Barr / Gizmodo To top it off, the touted multi-frame gen could possibly grant four times the performance for 50-series GPUs, at least if the game supports it. That is a boon for those who can afford the new RTX 50-series. The RTX 5090 tops off at $2,000. The gamers who would most benefit from frame gen are those who may only afford a lower-end GPU. Huang declined to offer any hints about an RTX 5050 or 5060, joking We announced four cards, and you want more?The world foundation model is just a prototype, just like much of Nvidias new AI software on display to the public. The real questions are, when will it be ready for primetime, and who will end up using it? Nvidia showed off oddball AI NPCs, in-game chatbots, AI nurses, and an audio generator last year. This year, it wants to bloom with its world foundation model, plus a host of AI microservices, including a weird animated talking head thats supposed to serve as your PCs always-on assistant. Perhaps, some of these will stick. In the cases where Nvidia hopes AI replaces nurses or audio engineers, we hope that doesnt happen. Huang considers Nvidia a small company with 32,000 worldwide employees. Yes, thats less than half of the staff Meta has, but you cant think of it as small in terms of the market influence for AI training chips. Because of its market position, it holds an outsized influence on the tech industry. The more people using AI, the more people will need to buy its AI-specific GPUs, plus any of its other AI software. If everybody buys their own at-home AI processing chip, they dont have to rely on outside data centers and external chatbots. Nvidia, just like every tech company, just needs to find a use for AI beyond replacing all our jobs.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Isaac Schultz Published January 10, 2025 By Matt Novak Published January 9, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published January 8, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published January 6, 2025 By Kyle Barr Published January 6, 2025 By Jorge Jimenez Published January 5, 2025