From Physical AI (that understands the physical world), the rise of agentic AI to Cosmos world foundation models, NVIDIA GTC AI Conference, being held from March 17-21 in San Jose, CA, covered almost every new wave in the AI ecosystem.
At the annual conference, NVIDIA also revealed that a family of chips that will be shipped in the second half of this year—Blackwell Ultra—as well as Vera Rubin, the next-gen graphics processing unit, will launch in 2026.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang in his keynote address pointed out that AI-powered robotics and automation are set to transform manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and other industries.
“AI has made extraordinary progress. It has only been 10 years now that we’ve been talking about AI ... It started with perception AI computer vision, speech recognition and then generative AI. The last 5 years we’ve largely focused on generative AI, teaching an AI how to translate from one modality to another modality, text to image, image to text, text to video,” he said.
According to him, generative AI has fundamentally changed how computing is done. From a retrieval computing model, we now have a generative computing model, whereas almost everything that we did in the past was about creating content in advance, storing multiple versions of it and fetching whatever version we think is appropriate at the moment of use.
“Now AI understands the context, understands what we’re asking, understands the meaning of our request and generates what it knows. If it needs it’ll retrieve information, augment its understanding and generate answers for us rather than retrieving data,” he said.
Every year, developers and tech enthusiasts across the world will keenly watch Jensen Huang’s keynote at the AI conference to understand the next wave. This year, the CEO pointed out ‘Physical AI’ is the next major wave in AI innovation.
“Physical AI understands the physical world, it understands things like friction and inertia cause and effect, object permanence- when something goes around the corner doesn’t mean has disappeared from this universe, it’s still there, just not seeable and so that ability to understand the physical world, the three-dimensional world is what’s going to enable a new era of AI- we call it Physical AI. Each one of these waves opens up new market opportunities for us,” he said.
On data centres, Huang expects the value of data centre buildout to reach $1 trillion. He also said that AI needs infrastructure and that AI is now going out “to the rest of the world,” in robotics and self-driving cars, factories and wireless networks. One of the earliest industries AI went into was autonomous vehicles, he said. “We build technology that almost every single self-driving car company uses,” he added, whether in the data centre or the car.