Nvidia already sells boatloads of computer chips to every major company building proprietary artificial intelligence models. But now, at a moment when public interest in open source and do-it-yourself AI is soaring, the company announced it will also begin offering a “personal AI supercomputer” later this year, starting at $3,000, that anyone can use in their own home or office.
Nvidia’s new desktop machine, dubbed Digits, will go on sale in May and is about the size of a small book. It contains an Nvidia “superchip” called GB10 Grace Blackwell, optimized to accelerate the computations needed to train and run AI models, and comes equipped with 128 gigabytes of unified memory and up to 4 terabytes of NVMe storage for handling especially large AI programs.
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.
Nvidia says the Digits machine, which stands for “deep learning GPU intelligence training system,” will be able to run a single large language model with up to 200 billion parameters, a rough measure of a model’s complexity and size. To do this today, you would need to rent space from a cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft, or build a custom system with a handful of chips designed for running AI. If two Digits machines are connected using a proprietary high-speed interconnect link, Nvidia says they will be able to run the most capable version available of Meta’s open source Llama model, which has 405 billion parameters.
Digits will make it easier for hobbyists and researchers to experiment with models that come close to the basic capabilities of OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s Gemini in their offices or basements. But the best versions of those proprietary models, housed inside giant data centers owned by Microsoft and Google, are most likely larger as well as more powerful than anything Digits could handle.
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 road map has become an important signal of where the industry is expected to head next.
When it’s released, Digits will be the most powerful consumer computing hardware Nvidia offers. It already sells a range of chipsets for AI development known as Jetson that start at roughly $250. These can run smaller AI models and either be used like a mini desktop computer or installed on a robot to test different AI programs.
Besides the new desktop system, Nvidia said today that it will soon be releasing several software tools for building and connecting so-called AI agents—programs that use large language models to perform useful tasks autonomously on behalf of people. This includes several custom versions of Llama called Nemotron that are fine-tuned and optimized for following instructions and planning actions in order to carry out agentic tasks. Agents have become the latest hot trend in AI, and many companies view them as a way to incorporate the technology into their operations to boost efficiency and save money.
“Agentic AI is the next frontier of AI development, and delivering on this opportunity requires full-stack optimization across a system of LLMs to deliver efficient, accurate AI agents,” Ahmad Al-Dahle, vice president and head of GenAI at Meta, said in a statement.
Jensen said during his CES keynote that Nvidia expects companies to build and maintain AI agents using its technology. “In a lot of ways the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future,” the CEO said. “In the future they will maintain, nurture, on-board, and improve a whole bunch of AI agents.”
Source : Wired
