AI has become a revolutionary force behind an increasing number of businesses in pretty much the entire industries. And things aren't going anywhere but up.
Since OpenAI created an arms race after the introduction of ChatGPT, pretty much all tech companies either adopt the generative AI, or create their own as rivals, or as supplements. And soon, everyone may have their own AI assistant.
According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang during SIGGRAPH 2024:
"Every single company, every single job within the company, will have AI assistance."
"One of the things that we’re announcing here this week is the concept of digital agents, digital AIs that will augment every single job in the company. And so one of the most important use cases that people are discovering is customer service. In the future, my guess is that it’s going to be human still, but AI in the loop."
"It could essentially be a chatbot version of you. Everything I’ve ever written or ever said could be vectorized and turned into a semantic database. Before responding, the AI would look at your prompt, search the appropriate content from the vector database, and then augment it in this generative process."
Huang made this remark as Nvidia announced the launch of digital agents, or digital AI, during the event.
Speaking to WIRED's Senior Writer Lauren Goode, the Taiwan-born entrepreneur said that digital agents are already enhancing pretty much every role in a company, with customer service being the most obvious example.
"Every single company or industry has customer service," he said.
"Today, it’s human doing customer service. In the future, it’s still going to be humans, but with AI in the loop. The benefit is that you’ll be able to retain the experiences of all the customer service agents you have, capturing that institutional knowledge, which you can then run through analytics and use to create better services for your customers," he explained.
His idea of future AI assistants that everybody will have, are essentially microservices hosted in the cloud, and connected to a digital human front end, in the form or an AI that can speak, make eye contact with an actual human, and animate empathetically.
"You could decide to connect your ChatGPT or your AI to the digital human, or you can connect your digital human to our retrieval-augmented generation customer service AI," Huang explained.
"You chat with the AI, it generates text, and that text is then translated to sound, so text-to-speech, and it’s that sound that animates the face. Then, RTX path tracing does the rendering of the digital human."
Huang credits three breakthroughs in ChatGPT that have paved the way for Nvidia’s digital assistant.
The first is reinforcement learning from human feedback to help AI produce the best answers, the second is guard railing, which helps direct AI to focus its responses within a particular domain, and third is retrieval-augmented generation, where data is vectorized — meaning it’s embedded in a way that captures its meaning.
Putting everything together, all these systems that consist of visual computing, simulation and large-language models, can create digital humans who can help people interact with digital systems of all kinds.
"Imagine the stories that you’re going to be able to tell with these tools," Huang said.
"We invent tools here, and these tools either accelerate our work, collaborate with us to do better or larger-scale work, or enable us to accomplish tasks that were previously impossible. What you’re going to see is that generative AI will become more controllable than before. Now we’re using Omniverse with generative AI to better control generative images and reduce hallucinations," he said.
Pretty soon, all jobs, including his own, will be modified.
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AI has been a game-changer for a handful of tech companies, including Nvidia, which according to Huang, is transforming not only the way they work but also the solutions they deliver to people and enterprises.
But the idea is to amplify human productivity and creativity, and not to replace.
Huang assured that the technology is “still pretty robotic.”
"We’re going to be robotic for some time. We’ve made this digital human technology quite realistic, but it’s still a robot, and I think that’s not a horrible way to do it,” he remarked.
"There are many different applications where having a human or near-human representation is much more engaging than a text box. Perhaps someone needs a companion, or healthcare requires a way to advise outpatients, or a tutor needs to educate a child — all these different applications are better off having someone who is much more human and able to connect with the audience."