At Rise of AI 2022 in Berlin, on the Applied AI Stage, Jaap Zuiderveld of NVIDIA argues that NVIDIA is best understood as a software company rather than a hardware maker: of its 24,000 employees, 22,000 work in engineering and 70 percent of those do software. He walks through NVIDIA's stack of pretrained models and SDKs, including Modulus, Clara, Riva, Maxine, Merlin, Omniverse Avatar, Drive, Isaac, Metropolis and Holoscan, and gives customer examples for each, from Siemens Energy's wind turbines to Amex's call-center voice recognition. He stresses that acceleration matters because waiting for results wastes the time of expensive data scientists, and cites growth figures: 3 million developers, more than 1,300 partners, 25,000 customers and 2,700 accelerated ISV applications. He highlights partnerships with Daimler on self-driving software and with BMW on an Omniverse digital twin of its factories, and describes AstraZeneca's use of an NVIDIA supercomputer to speed up COVID vaccine development. He closes by describing simulating the physical world in virtual environments as NVIDIA's next major wave.
Key takeaways
- NVIDIA describes itself as an engineer-led software company: of 24,000 employees, 22,000 work in engineering and 70 percent of those do software.
- NVIDIA offers pretrained models across domains, including Modulus for physics simulation, Clara/MONAI for healthcare imaging, Riva for speech, Maxine for video, and Merlin for recommendations.
- NVIDIA partners with Daimler on self-driving software targeted for the road in 2024 and with BMW on an Omniverse digital twin spanning multiple factories.
- NVIDIA counts about 3 million developers worldwide, more than half of whom joined in the past year, and accelerates over 2,700 ISV applications.
- AstraZeneca used an NVIDIA-built supercomputer in Cambridge to accelerate COVID vaccine development by more than a year.
Detailed notes
NVIDIA as an engineer-led software company
Zuiderveld opens by saying most people know NVIDIA only from gaming and do not know the company otherwise, even though a lot of what is done in AI today comes from gaming technology. He states that NVIDIA has 24,000 employees, of whom 22,000 work in engineering, and that 70 percent of those do software engineering against 30 percent hardware engineering. On that basis he describes NVIDIA as an engineer-led software company rather than a sales or hardware company.
The pretrained model stack
He presents NVIDIA's full stack of pretrained models and SDKs, meant to make the technology easier to use and to "democratize" it. Examples he gives: Modulus, a pretrained physics-based simulation model, used by Siemens Energy to develop wind turbines; Clara/MONAI, a healthcare model for image recognition developed with King's College Hospital and the NHS in the UK, using federated learning to protect patient data; Riva, a natural language processing model used by Amex so call-center staff can better recognize customer voices and questions; Maxine, which enhances video images in tools like Teams or Zoom; Nemo, an advanced NLP model comparable to Alexa; Merlin, a recommendation engine that lets companies compete with players like Amazon without training a full model from scratch; Omniverse Avatar; Drive, developed with Daimler for self-driving cars planned for the road in 2024; Isaac for robotics, with Amazon using it to reduce accidents and improve routing in distribution centers; Metropolis for video surveillance, used by most major airports; and Holoscan for medical imaging and instruments, with Siemens as a major user.
Why acceleration matters
Zuiderveld argues that speed changes how businesses operate: getting an answer in five minutes instead of a day makes decision-making faster and more agile. He notes that the most expensive resource in a company is often its data scientists, so making them wait for results is costly regardless of hardware cost. He cites NVIDIA figures: an HPE server with one Hopper-architecture GPU is already faster than the fastest supercomputer from ten years ago; NVIDIA has 3 million developers worldwide, more than half of whom joined in the last year; it follows 10,000 startups worldwide, 450 of them in Germany; it accelerates more than 2,700 applications from independent software vendors; and it has more than 450 SDKs and models and 8 million CUDA developers. He adds that NVIDIA has about 3,000 people in Israel following its acquisition of Mellanox, and describes a growth rate of 50 to 60 percent year over year, including in Europe and China.
Industry examples and the next wave: digital twins
He gives further customer examples: AstraZeneca used an NVIDIA-built supercomputer in Cambridge to develop its COVID vaccine, accelerating the process by more than a year; the Human Brain Project uses NVIDIA technology to research the origins of Parkinson's disease; and Red Bull's F1 design work benefits from NVIDIA technology. He states NVIDIA has 25,000 customers globally and more than 1,300 partners. He names simulating the physical world in a virtual environment as the next major wave, citing that more than 8.6 billion compute hours are already used yearly for rendering in media and entertainment. As an example he shows a video of BMW building a complete digital twin of its factories on Omniverse to plan production, improve logistics and coordinate global teams virtually, expanding the initiative to three additional factories totaling more than six million square meters.
Q&A highlights
Asked how he represents NVIDIA in Germany, Zuiderveld says he works with a local team of about 1,000 people, including significant software engineering in Munich and Berlin, where NVIDIA's Omniverse development headquarters is located, plus a commercial team of about 20 people. He says he follows the German automotive market closely because he expects it to go through major change, and warns that Germany needs to move quickly on AI or risk repeating its late reaction to electrification in the old automotive industry.
Quotes
In essence we're a software company, we're not a hardware company.
Jaap Zuiderveld
The most expensive good you have in a company is probably the people who are doing data mining.
Jaap Zuiderveld
Questions answered in this talk
Is NVIDIA a hardware company or a software company?
According to Jaap Zuiderveld at Rise of AI 2022, NVIDIA is in essence a software company: of its 24,000 employees, 22,000 work in engineering, and 70 percent of those do software engineering rather than hardware engineering.
What is NVIDIA Omniverse used for in manufacturing?
At Rise of AI 2022, Jaap Zuiderveld describes BMW using NVIDIA Omniverse to build a digital twin of its factories, simulating production planning, logistics and global team coordination virtually, and expanding the project to three additional factories.
How did NVIDIA technology contribute to COVID vaccine development?
Jaap Zuiderveld says at Rise of AI 2022 that AstraZeneca used an NVIDIA-built supercomputer in Cambridge to develop its COVID vaccine, accelerating the process by more than a year.