Nvidia became a $1 trillion company thanks to AI. Look inside its lavish Star Trek-inspired HQ

Welcome to a new issue of VentureBeat Weekly!

Last week, I had a lot of fun visiting the nearly $1 billion Star Trek-themed NVIDIA headquarters in in Santa Clara, California — a perfect base camp for a company who recently joined the $1 trillion club. I have a hunch the company will live long and prosper.

-- Sharon Goldman , senior writer covering AI

Over a million square feet across two massive steel and glass structures. Hundreds of conference rooms named after?Star Trek?places, alien races and starships, as well as astronomical objects — planets, constellations and galaxies. Acres of greenery and elevated “birds’ nests” where people can work and meet. A bar called “Shannon’s” with a panoramic view and plenty of table space for board games.?

This is the nearly $1 billion headquarters of Nvidia in Santa Clara, California —?located on a patch of prime Silicon Valley land where the technology company has spent the past three decades growing from a hardware provider for video game acceleration to a full-stack hardware and software company currently?powering the generative AI revolution.

But amid the lavish architecture and the fun perks, it can be difficult to discern the hard work and intense pressure that supported Nvidia’s entrance into the $1 trillion valuation club last month, alongside fellow tech giants Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.?As I walked the equivalent of a winding Yellow Brick Road to the main entrance, with a view of the towering curves and lines of the two buildings rising over the San Tomas Expressway, I wondered whether I’d get a peek behind the PR curtain — at Nvidia’s true nature.?

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Catch up on some of our other top AI coverage from the past week:

Researchers at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley have published an unreviewed paper on the open access journal?arXiv.org, which found that the “performance and behavior” of OpenAI’s ChatGPT?large language models?(LLMs) have changed between March and June 2023. The researchers concluded that their tests revealed “performance on some tasks have gotten substantially worse over time.”

“The whole motivation for this research: We’ve seen a lot of anecdotal experiences from users of ChatGPT that the models’ behavior is changing over time,” James Zou, a Stanford professor and one of the three authors of the research paper, told VentureBeat. “Some tasks may be getting better or other tasks getting worse. This is why we wanted to do this more systematically to evaluate it across different time points.”

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Facebook parent Meta unveils LLaMA 2 open-source AI model for commercial use?

In a blockbuster announcement today designed to coincide with the?Microsoft Inspire conference, Meta announced its new AI model, LLaMA 2 (Large Language Model Meta AI). Not only is this new large language model (LLM) now available, it’s also open-source and freely available for commercial use — unlike the first LLaMA, which was licensed only for research purposes.

The news, coupled with Microsoft’s outspoken support for LLaMA 2, means the fast-moving world of?generative AI?has just shifted yet again. Now the many?enterprises rushing to embrace AI, albeit cautiously, have another option to choose from, and this one is entirely free — unlike leader and rival?OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, or challengers like?Cohere.

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Hollywood is on strike over AI, but companies see creative potential in digital humans

Hollywood actors and writers are currently?striking, and one of their biggest concerns is the impact of?generative AI?on their industry and their jobs. In a?news?conference?last Thursday, Fran Drescher, president of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) union, said AI poses an “existential threat to creative professions, and all actors and performers deserve contract language that protects them from having their identity and talent exploited without consent and pay.”

However, a flock of high-flying generative AI video startups, including Synthesia, Hour One and Soul Machines, don’t see it that way. They view AI-generated avatars, or digital humans, as filled with powerful creative potential for business, Hollywood, and celebrities who consent to the use of their AI likenesses.?

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