Humanoid robots to clean our homes, hands-free self-driving cars and super-computers the size of lunch boxes will arrive in the near future, according to announcements at a US tech event.
Tens of thousands of people heard the predictions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Tuesday, as well as products unveiled by NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang.
But the chip maker is not alone in its AI-focused vision of the future, with other tech giants revealing innovative plans at CES such as putting AI in televisions, refrigerators, security cameras and even bird baths.
The forecasts come after record-spending and a bumper year for AI technology worldwide, and as the federal government considers mandatory restrictions on high-risk use of the technology following public consultation and a Senate inquiry.
NVIDIA delivered the keynote speech on the first of day the event, and Mr Huang said generative AI technology that had dominated the industry’s attention, resources and development would evolve into “agentic AI”, followed by “physical AI”.
The US tech firm, which creates computer chips, graphics processing units and software, aimed to accelerate this change by creating AI software to recognise the physical world.
Its NVIDIA Cosmos physical AI model, Mr Huang said, would be trained on video of real places and designed to teach AI about physics and “object permanence” so it could produce more realistic scenarios and power humanoid robots.
“The ChatGPT moment for general robotics is just around the corner,” he said.
“All the enabling technologies that I’ve been talking about is going to make it possible for us in the next several years to see very rapid breakthroughs, surprising breakthroughs in general robotics.”
Self-driving cars would also benefit from the technology, Mr Huang said, as well as a next-generation vehicle processor called Thor AGX that offered 20 times the computing power of the previous model.
“This is going to be a very large industry,” he said.
“I predict that (autonomous vehicles) will likely be the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry.”
NVIDIA announced it would partner with Toyota to develop self-driving software in future, in addition to its work with companies including Tesla and Google’s Waymo.
The firm also showed off a prototype of its shrunken AI supercomputer, named Project Digits, at the event, and a new line of graphics processing units designed to handle AI software.
AI technology also dominated other product launches on the event’s first day, with Google and Samsung announcing AI features for their upcoming televisions, including smart voice assistants and on-screen translations.
LG also showed off smart fridges with AI software programmed to identify the food stored inside, while Samsung’s refrigerators used AI technology to detect and predict temperature changes and adapt to them.
Amazon also announced AI-powered vehicle alerts for its Ring security cameras at CES while, on the more novel side of tech, AI features were shown off in the Birdfy Bath Pro bird feeder that, for a subscription fee, will snap photos of avian visitors and identify their species.
