Nvidia bets on robotics to drive future growth

I think that most people are underestimating Nvidia strategy.

Their bet is that AI will unlock robotics use and they don't want to be simply compute providers, they want to innovate on the whole chain, software, hardware, services, everything.

Their position is quite unique as their R&D is basically financed by their future competitors, they are making bank while going where the puck will be.

What is the new breakthrough in robotics that is gpu driven ? There are subsets of the overall problem that can be solved by a gpu (eg object detection) but the whole planning and control algo scheme seems to be more or less the same as it has been for the past decades. These typically involve non-convex optimization so not much gpu benefit.

I personally think apart from GPU and compute for intelligence for meaningful robotics to take off we still have lot of things to crack like better battery, better affordable sensors, microelectronics etc, I'm pretty sure we will get there but I don't think one company can do it.

The ChatGPT, LLMs, generative AI, and other hyped usecases have been the driving force for Nvidia: it injected huge sums of money into their R&D, which also stimulated the economy as developers ran to build build build in order to keep up with the demand for datacenters, which in turn required more infrastructure building to satiate the thirst and power needs of datacenters, etc. Before, ChatGPT, I recall the hype was blockchain, crypto, and NFTs; and maybe before that, it was "big data."

As the LLM, generative AI, etc. bubble begins to deflate due to investors and companies finding it hard to make profits from those AI usecases, Nvidia needs to pivot. This article indicates that Nvidia is hedging on robotics as the next driving force that will continue to sustain the massive interest in their products. Personally, I don't see how robotics can maintain that same driving force for their products, and investors will find it hard to squeeze profit out of it, and they'll be back to searching for another hype. It's like Nvidia is trying to create a market to justify their products and continued development, similar to what Meta has tried, to spectacular failure, with the Metaverse for their virtual products.

After the frenzy that sustained these compute products transitioned from big data, to crypto, and now, to AI, I'm curious what the next jump will be; I don't think the "physical AI" space of robotics can sustain Nvidia in the way that they're hoping.

I have worked with Jetson Orin platform, and honestly Nvidia has something that is really easy to work with there. The Jetsons are basically a full GPU (plus some stuff) at very low power. If I were tasked with building a robot it would likely be the first place I look.

After using FSD 13 for 2 weeks I'm convinced we are close to solving self driving. Too bad the everyone lost interest and now robotics is the hot new thing.

Now if we could get a robotics platform like ROS that actually cares about modern dev patterns and practices from dev's slapping keyboards through production deployment with decent smoke tests, easy versioned artifacts and no need to understand linux packaging details...

Coming from web / app dev this was my very least favorite part of working on the software side of robotics with ROS.

Robotics has long been an area of promise but (I think) limited returns

I just finished reading Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s book “Power and Progress” where they talk about how the leaders in the technology space is (unfortunately) able to set the direction of the technology according to their goals, not humanity’s goals. This is an excellent example of such power. NVIDIA wants to expand its business and pushes the industry to use more and more AI, which highly depends on their cards. Now all the VCs put billions of dollars towards this goal, thousands of Phds spend all their time, and companies change direction of business to catch the AI hype. Not necessarily because we decided this is the best for humanity, just because it’s the best for NVIDIA.

Sounds like NVIDIA doesn't know what the hell the future is going to look like but hopes it's something to do with robotics, and is taking some the boatloads of money from the past few years to build out product lines for every conceivable robotics need. Good for them I guess.

The article references a "ChatGPT moment" for physical robotics, but honestly I think the Chat GPT moment has kind of come and gone, and the world still runs largely as it ever did. Probably not the best analogy, unless they're just talking about buckets of VC money flowing into the space to fund lots of bad ideas, which would be good for NVIDIA financially.

As an admitted non-expert in this field, I guess the one thing that really annoys me about articles like this is the lack of a concrete vision. It's like Boston Dynamics and their dancing robots, which while impressive, haven't really amounted to much outside of the lab. The last thing I remember reading was a military prototype to carry stuff for infantry that ended up being turned down because it was too loud.

The article even confirms this general perspective, ending with "As of right now, we don’t have very effective tools for verifying the safety and reliability properties of machine learning systems, especially in robotics. This is a major open scientific question in the field,” said Rosen."

So whatever robot you're developing is incredibly complex, to be trusted with heavy machinery or around consumers directly, while being neither verifiably safe nor reliable.

Sorry, but almost everything in this article sounds like a projection of AI-hype onto physical robotics, with all the veracity of "this is good for Bitcoin". Sounds like NVIDIA is doing right by its shareholders though.

took them 16 years to fix night light bug in the driver but yeah robots are the future

if they really want to bet on robotics, I want them to release a $10 variant of jetson board.

What breakthrough are people expecting in robotics I wonder?

Since cops, guards and military officers are itching to get autonomous guns it's probably a reasonable move. The genocide of palestinians has showed that people operated gun drones aren't distance enough, the operators cost a lot in psych treatment and personnel churn.