From surgical robots to humanoid robot fleets for household chores, here’s what Nvidia announced about its robots at GTC.
Nvidia is betting on an AI-driven robot workforce to shape the future of the country.
“It is very likely that you might know robots, and my friend Elon is also working on this, [are] likely going to be one of the largest new consumer electronics markets, and surely one of the largest industrial equipment markets,” CEO Jensen Huang said at his keynote speech at Nvidia’s first-ever Washington D.C. edition of the GTC AI conference.
Huang’s “friend” Elon Musk is working to build a “robot army” for Tesla, but one that he supposedly only feels comfortable to build if he is granted an unprecedented $1 trillion pay package in an upcoming vote next week. In an earnings call last week, Musk also made some bold claims about the potential of a robot workforce, claiming that Tesla’s Optimus robots could achieve “probably 5x the productivity of a person per year.”
Nvidia executives see a robot workforce as a core part of America’s re-industrialization, something that has also been a part of the Trump administration‘s talking points. Nvidia’s vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology Rev Lebaredian thinks robots could account for over half a million open manufacturing jobs.
“We have this standing problem pretty much in every country and in many different sectors and industries where there are jobs that are open but nobody wants to fill them, and they tend to be jobs that have one or more of the three D’s: dull, dirty, or dangerous jobs,” Lebaredian told Gizmodo. One example he gives is mining.
When you combine that with a population that is gradually getting older, Lebaredian claims, “the only real solution” to continue global production at its current scale “is to shift some of that labor over to automation and robotics.”
“We’re hard at work trying to build a good robot brain. Once we build a good robot brain, combined with the advancements we’re making in robot bodies that you’re seeing across the world, pretty soon, we’re going to have a robotic workforce that could fill those job openings I was talking about,” Lebaredian said.
