Interview with Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun: Cryptocurrency World View and Meta-Universal Dream

Huang Renxun shared his and future virtual reality integration, and introduced Nvidia's Metaverse infrastructure Omniverse.

Original title: "Nvidia,
Written by: Moon

On July 8, 2020, a day in the history of human science and technology, NVIDIA surpassed Intel in market value for the first time and became the largest chip company in the United States. It seems to be a declaration:

One era is over, another era begins.

It was Huang Renxun, a Chinese entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, who brought one era to an end and another to begin. He has a number of nicknames, such as graphics card madman, "two bomb champions", AI madman...

In the video card bar, there is a poetry Zeng who said: "First there will be benevolence and then there will be days, the video card is in the hand to abuse the gods."

In the game world, Huang Renxun is the nuclear madman and explosive demon among the players; in the world of cryptocurrency, he also stands at the top, looking down on investors who are crazy about graphics cards.

Recently, when Huang Renxun participated in the Computex 2021 online conference, he revealed his views on the combination of NFT, Metaverse, Ethereum and the future of virtual reality, and praised and promoted Nvidia's Metaverse infrastructure Omniverse.

Deep Tide TechFlow compiled the interview transcript of Venturebeat, explored Huang Renxun's cryptocurrency worldview, and explained in detail how Omniverse supports Nvidia's meta-universe dream.

Meta universe

In the interview, Huang Renxun, the founder of Nvidia, shared his views on Metaverse. He believes that with the continuous development of science and technology in the future, the virtual world and the real world will be cross-integrated. Now it is the cusp of the metaverse world, and NFT will also be in it. play an important role.

In addition, Huang Renxun focused on Omniverse, a virtual collaboration platform under Nvidia.

Huang Renxun:

I believe we are on the cusp of the meta-universe.

As you know, the meta universe is a virtual world connected to the world in which we live and shared by multiple people. It has a real design and economic environment. You have a real avatar, either a real person or a character.

In the meta universe, you will spend time with friends. For example, you will communicate. In the future, we may now live in a meta-universe. It will be a communication meta-space, not flat but 3D. We can almost feel that we are right next to each other. This is how we travel through time.

It can simulate the future. There will be many types of meta-universes, for example, video games are one of them, Fortnite (Fortnite) will eventually evolve into a meta-universe form, or some derivative form of it. You can imagine that World of Warcraft will one day evolve into a meta-universe form, with video game versions and AR versions.

The art you have is digital art. You own it through NFT, unique and completely digital.

You can wear our glasses, or your mobile phone. You can see that this virtual world is right in front of your eyes, with plenty of light, and it belongs to you. We will see this superposition on top of the physical world, which can be a meta-universe superposition if you wish.

In the industrial world, this building completely first exists in virtual reality, and we can design it digitally so that it exists as a digital twin of a physical building in VR.

We will be able to simulate everything and train our robots in it. We can simulate how to best distribute air conditioning to reduce energy consumption; design certain deformation mechanisms to block sunlight while letting in as much light as possible.

Before we deploy anything in the physical world, we can simulate all of these in our digital twins and architectural meta-universes, and be able to use VR and AR to get in and out of it.

These are all parts that must be combined. One of the most important technologies that we must build. As far as consumers are concerned, one of the most important technologies is AR.

In addition, VR is becoming easier to obtain and use. In the context of the industrial meta-universe, one of the most important technologies is the VR environment based on physical simulation. An object you design in the meta-universe, if you throw it on the ground, it will fall to the ground because it obeys the laws of physics. The lighting conditions will be exactly the same as what we have seen, and the material will be simulated as physical.

These things are an important part of it, which is why we invented the Nvidia Omniverse. It is so important, it is one of our most important work organizations, and it combines almost all the work that Nvidia has ever done.

Omniverse is now in the open beta phase. It is being tested by 400 companies around the world. It is used by BMW to create a digital factory. It is also used by WPP, the world's largest advertising company, and it is used by large analog architects.

BMW Group is using Omniverse to build a digital factory

Bentley is the world's largest large-scale infrastructure designer, and they just announced that they will use Omniverse to create a digital twin.

Omniverse is a very important product and it is worth seeing.

Omniverse: Nvidia's meta universe

What exactly is Omniverse in Huang Renxun's mouth?

Omniverse is a cloud platform based on USD (Universal Scene Description), focusing on real-time simulation and digital collaboration, with a highly realistic physical simulation engine and high-performance rendering capabilities.

Simply put, Omniverse can support multiple people to co-create content on the platform, enabling everyone to create and simulate a shared virtual 3D world that conforms to the laws of physics, which is highly compatible with the real world, just like a virtual world created with real data 1:1 .

The vision and application scenarios of the Omniverse platform will not be limited to the gaming and entertainment industries. Architecture, engineering and construction, and manufacturing are all covered.

In 2017, NVIDIA launched Holodeck, a tool based on VR technology. Designers can see the performance effects and parameters of modeling, light and other content in the virtual world in the VR environment, which can be regarded as paving the way for "entering" the virtual world. Good way.

In April 2021, at the Nvidia GTC Conference, Huang Renxun demonstrated Omniverse, a virtual work platform called "Engineer's Metaverse".

Omniverse launched a beta version in October 2020, and more than 17,000 customers have conducted a test experience. Many companies including BMW, Ericsson, Volvo, Adobe, Epic Games, and others are cooperating with Omniverse.

Omni comes from Latin, meaning "all" and "all." Omniverse seems to mean the universal universe, and it also represents Nvidia's meta-universe dream: to become the entrance and infrastructure of the real world connecting the digital virtual world, creating a meta-universe The underlying technology platform.

Through the simulation of the real physical world in Omniverse, a "digital twin world" is established, and people can truly enter this digital world through NVIDIA's VR technology.

This digital world is no longer just a wild imagination space in the past game concepts, but a digital world that is highly consistent with the real world, logic and physical laws are self-consistent, and conform to Newton's three major laws.

When asked in an interview how important digital twins are to manufacturing, business, and society as a whole, Huang Renxun said, "In the future, the digital or virtual world will be thousands of times larger than the physical world, and there may be a new Shanghai. , New York, factories and buildings will have a digital twin to simulate and track its physical version. Engineers and software programmers can simulate new software, and then gradually apply it to reality. Software running in the real world will be first Simulate in a digital twin and then download to the physical version.”

Similar to Kusama , Omniverse's most ambitious blueprint is to become a testnet for the real world.

At the same time, people will be able to enter and exit the two worlds through the "wormhole", people use VR to enter the virtual world, and the objects in the virtual world will be simulated by the laws of real physics. The digital world and the real world are no longer just parallel concepts. The two can intersect and influence each other.

If Omniverse matures, productivity in the real world will be greatly enhanced and improved. Digital twins mean that in industrial production, people will be able to perform multiple tests and experiments through virtual world simulations, reducing costs and improving development efficiency. For this reason, Omniverse is now widely used in manufacturing.

Predictions about the future

Huang Renxun looked forward to the digital twin world created by Omniverse and gave his own predictions for the future.

Huang Renxun:

In the case of Omniverse, let me make a few predictions. I believe that there will be a larger market, a larger industry, and more designers and creators, designing digital things in virtual reality and meta-universe, rather than designing things in the physical world.

Today, most designers are designing things like cars and buildings, including wallets and shoes. All these things will be many times larger in the meta-universe than in our universe, maybe 100 times.

Second, the economy in the meta-universe, Omniverse's economy, will be larger than the economy in the physical world, and digital currencies and encrypted currencies can be used in the meta-universe world.

The question is, how do we create something like this? A virtual world, it is so realistic that you are willing to build something for that virtual world? If it just looks like a cartoon, why bother?

If it looks beautiful and exquisite, it is worth an artist spend a lot of time creating a beautiful building because it looks beautiful, or you have built a beautiful-looking product that can only be used in the digital world— —You make a car that can only be used in the digital world, you can only buy and drive it in the digital world, an artwork that can only be bought and enjoyed in the digital world.

I believe several things will happen.

First, an engine is needed. This is the purpose of creating Omniverse for the realistic Metaverse. It is capable of rendering very high-fidelity images.

Second, it must abide by the laws of physics, the laws of particle physics, the laws of gravity, the laws of electromagnetics, the laws of electromagnetic waves, such as light and radio waves, and the laws of pressure and sound.

If we can create such an engine where the laws of physics are obeyed and it is photo-realistic, then people are willing to create something very beautiful and put it into the Omniverse.

Finally, it must be completely open. This is why we chose the Universal Scene Description Language (USD) invented by Pixar. We have invested a lot of resources to make it dynamic, so that physics can happen through USD, and these AI agents can enter and exit through AR. We can use VR to enter Omniverse, just like a wormhole. Finally, Omniverse must be scalable and in the cloud.

We created a real engine that follows the laws of physics, renders physics-based materials, supports artificial intelligence, and has wormholes that can be accessed using open standards. This is a huge work system, and we have the best engineers and scientists in the world studying it.

Some final thoughts. The computer industry is undergoing a complete reshaping process. Artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful forces in the history of the computer industry. Imagine what kind of software can be written by a computer that can write software on its own? As Moore's Law in CPU has come to an end, accelerated computing is recognized as a wonderful way forward.

In the future, computers will continue to be miniaturized, and mobile phones will continue to get better. However, one of the most important areas in computing will be the data center. Not only is it huge, but the way we program the data center has also undergone a fundamental change.

Can you imagine that an engineer can write a piece of software that runs in the entire data center, with every computer busy? And it supports and serves millions of people at the same time. The calculation of the data center scale has arrived, and it is now the unit of calculation. Not just a PC, but the entire data center.

Finally, I believe that convergence, the convergence of cloud-native computing, artificial intelligence, accelerated computing, and the last piece of the puzzle, private 5G or industrial 5G, will make it possible for us to put computers anywhere.

They will be in remote places, or broom cabinets and attics in retail stores, everywhere, and they will be managed by a piece of glass. This piece of glass will coordinate all these computers while they process data and process artificial intelligence applications, and make correct decisions on site.

Ethereum and mining

In the interview, Huang Renxun also talked about Ethereum and mining. In his opinion, Ethereum is very valuable and looks forward to turning to the POS mechanism.

In addition, Huang Renxun believes that Nvidia has implemented the CMP (graphic card mining dedicated GPU) strategy, which has achieved good results. In the future, two major series of CMP and GeForce will be developed at the same time to ensure that the demand for graphics cards from miners and gamers is diverted.

Finally, he believes that cryptocurrency mining will exist for a long time.

Huang Renxun:

Ethereum chose our GPU because it is the world's largest programmable distributed supercomputer network.

When Bitcoin first appeared, it used our GPU; when Ethereum appeared, it used our GPU; when other cryptocurrencies began to appear, they used algorithms running on our GPU. Proof of work established their credibility, feasibility and integrity. This is the most ideal, most energy-saving, and most efficient method, and has the advantage of a very large distributed network, and this is where it comes from.

Am I excited about Proof of Stake (POS)? The answer is yes, I believe the demand for Ethereum has reached a very high level.

Ethereum has established its own position. It now has the opportunity to implement version 2.0, inheriting platform methods and all services built on it. It is legal, credible, and works well. Many people rely on Ethereum for DeFi and other aspects. , This is a good time to realize proof of equity.

In the future, these transactions can be processed much faster, and now there are so many people building applications on it, so Ethereum will be very valuable.

During this period, a large amount of Ethereum will be mined, which is why we created CMP (NVIDIA's GPU specifically for cryptocurrency mining).

We sold 150 million US dollars of CMP graphics cards last quarter, and this quarter is expected to sell 400 million US dollars. One advantage of CMP is that it cannot be resold to GeForce customers because it does not play games. We hope we can share some pressure on GeForce games so that gamers can get more GeForce supplies.

In the future, I believe that cryptocurrency mining will not disappear and will continue to exist. This is a legal way for people to want to exchange value. You can argue whether it is a store of value, but you cannot deny that it can be exchanged for value. More importantly, Ethereum and other similar forms in the future are excellent distributed blockchain methods for protecting transactions. You need the blockchain to have some basic value and be able to mine that basic value.

In the future, Ethereum may not be as hot as it is now. In a year's time, it may cool down a bit, but I think crypto mining will continue to exist.