Huang Renxun wants to build a "second earth"? What does it mean for "meta universe"

With the explosion of the meta-universe concept, NVIDIA is rapidly growing into a top AI player with a market value of up to 770 billion U.S. dollars by virtue of its Omniverse platform and its achievements in AI and high-performance computing.

Huang Renxun, the founder and CEO of NVIDIA, who is a very individual leader in the science and technology circle, brings out some interesting things at industry technology exhibitions every year.

At the just-concluded NVIDIA GTC 2021 conference, Huang Renxun made a surprise appearance, expressing his obsession with the meta-universe that exploded this year, and announced that he would build a "second earth"!

For a time, it triggered a heated discussion on the "whole network".

"Metaverse" format opens: Omniverse Avatar

At this conference, NVIDIA launched the world’s smallest, powerful, and most energy-efficient new-generation AI supercomputer NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin, NVIDIA Triton inference server and NVIDIA A2 Tensor Core GPU accelerator, NeMo Megatron, NVIDIA Modulus, and a new autonomous driving platform DRIVE A series of blockbuster new technologies such as Hyperion 8 GA.

At the same time, NVIDIA also launched 3 new acceleration libraries: 1. An accelerated solver for operations research optimization problems-NVIDIA ReOpt, which can realize real-time route planning and optimization. 2. The cuQuantum DGX device is equipped with an acceleration library for quantum computing workflow, and can use state vector and tensor network methods to accelerate quantum circuit simulation. 3. Large-scale accelerated computing cuNumeric in the PyData and NumPy ecosystems belongs to the NVIDIA RAPIDS open source Python data science suite.

In addition, Huang Renxun also brought a brand new virtual avatar platform-Omniverse Avatar, which carries his vision of the "meta universe", to completely open the pattern of the meta universe.

As a master of NVIDIA’s series of advanced AI technologies, Omniverse Avatar can integrate Metropolis’ perception capabilities, Riva’s voice recognition capabilities, Merlin’s recommendation capabilities, and Omniverse’s animation rendering capabilities.

Omniverse Avatar can help developers build a fully interactive virtual avatar, which is vivid enough to respond to voice and facial prompts, understand multiple languages, and give intelligent suggestions.

Through the Omniverse Avatar platform, users can build customized AI assistants for video conferencing and collaboration platforms, customer support platforms, content creation, application revenue and digital twins, robotic applications, and more.

Nvidia's "Meta Universe" Exploration Road

For Nvidia, as early as October 2020, the company launched the beta version of Omniverse, a real-time simulation and collaboration platform for enterprises, in October. At that time, it attracted companies including BMW, Ericsson, Volvo, Adobe, and Epic Games. Many companies cooperate with it.

In April of this year, once the official version of Omniverse was launched, it was called the virtual working platform of "engineer's meta-universe".

Huang Renxun commented that “Omniverse allows individuals to simulate and create a shared 3D virtual world that obeys the laws of physics.”

Since then, NVIDIA has completely set off a wave of domestic "meta universe".

According to the relevant person in charge of Nvidia, Nvidia has spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars on this.

"Humans need to'take action to ease and adapt before it is too late'". At this GTC conference, Huang Renxun talked about many ideas about the future: NVIDIA's future planning will mainly focus on biosynthesis, climate prediction and other aspects closely related to the future of mankind.

"Using physical principles and data derived from principle models and observations, the Physics-ML model is optimized for training on multiple GPUs and multiple nodes to predict climate change in super real-time, create a digital twin model of the earth, or integrate its data Transmission to the meta-universe."

Finally, Huang Renxun officially announced that the "Earth-two second earth" is coming soon.

It is reported that Nvidia's last supercomputer is named Cambridge-1, or C-1, and then Nvidia will start to develop a new supercomputer "E-2", or "Earth-two" the second earth.

Huang Renxun emphasized: “All the technologies that we have invented so far are indispensable for the realization of the meta-universe, and I can’t imagine more magnificent and important uses than this.”

Behind the explosion of meta-universe needs to be vigilant

In fact, in addition to Nvidia, regarding the sudden explosion of Metaverse, many technology companies in the industry have followed up the layout this year and used this trend to break through.

For example, Facebook (now renamed Meta) agreed to acquire PlayGiga, which specializes in cloud game development, as early as 2019; earlier this year, Microsoft Corp. acquired electronic game company ZeniMax Media Inc. for $7.5 billion, and so on. Another example is Nvidia, which has been exploring the meta-universe from the past to the present. All of these have made VR/AR and related derivative industries soar.

Of course, not all technology companies agree with the concept of meta universe. Some insiders also commented that "the current technology that constitutes the concept of "meta universe" is weak, the degree of commercialization is low, and it is in the initial stage of development."

Facebook (now renamed Meta)’s old rival Snap Inc. has a different view, even though the company is currently investing in augmented reality technology.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc. previously stated at the Tech Live conference, “The reason why we are so interested in augmented reality is because of its foothold. It’s the world we share."

Therefore, seeing this, we will also think that if we can make the world better, then some aspects of the development trend of these technologies will be worthy of people's pursuit. But at the same time, we must remain vigilant at all times to avoid being "confused and addicted" by the giant virtual world depicted in the concept of "meta universe".