If you are a software developer, your profession may be nearing its end. Blame it on Nvidia’s new supercomputer.
The US-based AI company, which is set to join the trillion-dollar club that includes Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, wants the world to stop relying on hardcore coding to develop apps and software.
With the rise of generative AI, “everyone is a programmer” now because all that one needs to do is “say something to the computer,” according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Why “everyone is now a programmer”
Computers will no longer care what or how you want to program, according to Huang. “It will try to understand what you mean because it has this incredibly large language model capability. And so the programming barrier is incredibly low,” he told delegates at the ongoing COMPUTEX tech summit in Taiwan yesterday (May 29).
The Nvidia chief said this era of computing is “special in several ways” and that generative AI can comprehend all formats of information, including text, figures, images, audio, and video. It “can now understand multimodality, which is the reason why this computing revolution can impact every industry,” he added.
It is this particular feature that is set to put millions of programmers out of jobs over the next few years.
Speed and efficiency
This means computer applications can now be created faster, and with more efficiency, transforming the developer world from low-code to no-code. Many software projects have been derailed by errors and bugs in codes, which the supercomputer has now eliminated for good. Anyone can now create a 2D model from a 3D one, with 4D ones not very far in sight. “The rate of progress, because it’s so easy to use, is the reason why it’s growing so fast,” Huang remarked.
Huang’s wealth has so far more than doubled to $34.9 billion from last year, data from the Bloomberg Billionaires Index showed. He is now ranked 37th globally in the rich list.
AI, Huang believes, will soon form the digital engine of our modern-day economies. Leading tech firms are now seeking to harness its benefits to develop more advanced and powerful large language models.
How does Nvidia’s supercomputer work?
Nvidia’s large-memory DGX GH200 supercomputer is the first to pair its Grace Hopper superchips with its NVLink switch system that powers the development of generative AI models for applications, recommender systems, and data analytics workloads.
“Generative AI, large language models, and recommender systems are the digital engines of the modern economy,” Huang, said in a press release on May 28. “DGX GH200 AI supercomputers integrate NVIDIA’s most advanced accelerated computing and networking technologies to expand the frontier of AI.”
Nvidia has already found a use for its just-unveiled AI supercomputer system. The Nvidia Helios Supercomputer it is building will be powered by four DGX GH200 systems and used by its research and development teams.
Nvidia Helios, which features 1024 Grace Hopper Superchips and is expected to come online by the end of the year, will have each of the DGX GH200 systems connected to Nvidia quantum-2 InfiniBand networking to supercharge throughput data for training large AI models.
Google, Microsoft, and Meta are expected to be the first users of Nvidia’s supercomputer.