Leading U.S. artificial intelligence companies NVIDIA and OpenAI say the world should be bracing for the arrival of AI-powered humanoid robots and “superintelligent” tools in the near future.
NVIDIA shared its plans on Monday for the arrival of “agentic AI” in the workplace, with AI assistants making their presence felt in the office. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said robots characterized by agentic AI will be “information workers so long as they could accommodate the computers that we have in our offices.”
Speaking at the annual CES tech trade show in Las Vegas, Mr. Huang said NVIDIA is focused on the types of robots and technologies that can work and function in the world around them, including agentic robots, self-driving cars and humanoid robots.
“The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” Mr. Huang predicted. “And, in fact, all of the enabling technologies that I’ve been talking about [are] going to make it possible for us in the next several years to see very rapid rates of surprising breakthroughs in general robotics.”
Mr. Huang announced a new partnership with Japanese carmaker Toyota to build the company’s next generation of autonomous vehicles. Rival automaker Mercedes-Benz is among the companies that are already collaborating with NVIDIA on autonomous vehicle projects, and Mr. Huang said Mercedes will have cars powered by NVIDIA going into production this year.
NVIDIA also released a new platform to help developers train their humanoid robots using “imitation learning” to more closely resemble humans.
“Imitation learning — a subset of robot learning — enables humanoids to acquire new skills by observing and mimicking expert human demonstrations,” NVIDIA’s Spencer Huang wrote on the company’s blog, announcing the new tool for developers.
Spencer Huang wrote that the NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic motion generation intends to make it easier for developers to train their robots by providing extensive data that is often prohibitively expensive.
While NVIDIA is projecting a “ChatGPT moment” for robotics to take the tech world by storm soon, the maker of the popular chatbot has grand plans for 2025 as well.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Sunday that his company believes it can build artificial general intelligence, AGI, and will potentially see the first AI agents “join the workforce” in 2025. AGI refers to a hypothetical AI system that could perform as well or better than humans across all cognitive domains.
With Mr. Altman’s vision of AGI coming into view, he wrote on his blog that his company has set its sights on a new pursuit of realizing the next level: “superintelligence.”
“We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word,” Mr. Altman wrote. “We love our current products, but we are here for the glorious future. With superintelligence, we can do anything else. Superintelligent tools could massively accelerate scientific discovery and innovation well beyond what we are capable of doing on our own, and, in turn, massively increase abundance and prosperity.”
Mr. Altman said he understood many people will dismiss superintelligence as science fiction and “somewhat crazy,” but his company is making a bet that there will be a radical upheaval from new superintelligent tools.
“We’re pretty confident that in the next few years, everyone will see what we see, and that the need to act with great care — while still maximizing broad benefit and empowerment — is so important,” he said.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.