All About Physical AI

At the recently held Computex 2024 in Taipei, NVIDIA king Jensen Huang spoke with full fervour about the promising developments in robotics. “The next wave of AI is here. Robotics, powered by physical AI, will revolutionise industries,” he said.?

Focusing on NVIDIA’s robotics’ progress and dedicating over 15 minutes of talk time to the same, Huang highlighted physical AIs as models that can understand instructions and autonomously perform complex tasks in the real world. From his confidence, it seems that this new paradigm shift will also be powered by NVIDIA, or rather, NVIDIA’s simulation platform, Omniverse.?

‘Digital twins’, built on the Omniverse platform, are leveraged by industries to train robots in a simulated world. By providing virtual replicas of physical objects or systems, robots can be tested and trained to fit into the real world. NVIDIA is not only providing a simulated environment, but also spearheading the whole digital avatar wave built with digital twins.

At the event, Huang also announced NVIDIA Inference Microservices (NIMs) that are avatar-based AI agents capable of working in teams to accomplish missions assigned by humans. This probably ushers in an era where digital twins will help us accomplish our daily tasks, without us being there.?

NVIDIA didn’t stop there. The company announced the general availability of NVIDIA ACE or Avatar Cloud Engine generative AI microservices. ACE simplifies the creation, animation and operation of lifelike humans across various sectors, including customer service, gaming, and even healthcare.?

Zoom chief Eric Yuan believes that one of the major benefits of AI at work will be the ability to create a digital twin which would be a deepfake avatar of yourself that can attend Zoom meetings.?

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Huang’s vision of physical AI is not limited to general-purpose robots but has a broader scope, including autonomous vehicles (AV). Speaking of AVs, something that he believes every single car will become in the future, NVIDIA has partnered with major electronic manufacturers, including Foxconn, Delta Electronics, Pegatron and Wistron, to boost EV and AV production.

While the world embraces the new wave of AI that invites physical embodiments of AI to coexist, a part of the world remains sceptical. A recent upheaval started by a few former employees of OpenAI stirred the discussion on how employers should prohibit NDAs and empower whistleblowers to openly speak up if their firms prioritise growth and profit over safety.?

An open letter demanding the same has been signed by former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, and computer scientist Stuart Russell have also backed the letter.?

Read the full story here.

Ascendion Chooses Chennai for GenAI Studio

Ascendion has inaugurated its GenAI Studio in Chennai, which is spearheaded by Prakash Balasubramanian, executive vice president of engineering management and head of India engineering operations.?

“We started with Chennai because we have extremely talented folks here, who possess deep engineering and mathematics knowledge,” said Balasubramanian, in an exclusive interaction with AIM.

Click here to read the full interview.?

Zoho Creator for Rural Education

Zoho’s low-code platform Zoho Creator is being leveraged by Indian institutions such as DAV, SRM, and NGOs such as Pratham to enable and improve education in rural India. Pratham uses Zoho Creator apps to facilitate better data collection, analysis, and reporting, saving significant time and effort.?

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