29th May 2023 – (New York) Nvidia Corporation has become the world’s most valuable listed semiconductor company as a major supplier of chips and computing systems for artificial intelligence (AI). Last week, the company forecast second-quarter revenue more than 50% above Wall Street estimates and announced it was boosting supply to meet surging demand for its AI chips, which are used to power ChatGPT and many similar services. Speaking to thousands of people at the Computex forum in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hailed AI as the end of the “digital divide,” saying that the programming barrier is incredibly low and everyone can now be a programmer by simply speaking to the computer.
Huang, who was born in southern Taiwan before his family emigrated to the United States when he was a child, delivered a speech in which he occasionally dropped in words of Mandarin or Taiwanese to the delight of the crowd. He said that AI was leading a computing revolution and that every computing era allowed users to do things that had not been possible before. Huang added that AI had an incredibly low programming barrier that had closed the digital divide, and that the rate of progress was why the sector was growing so fast. He also said that this technology was going to touch literally every single industry.
Nvidia’s chips have helped companies such as Microsoft Corp add human-like chat features to search engines such as Bing. Huang demonstrated what AI could do, including getting a program to write a short pop song praising Nvidia with only a few words of instruction. He also unveiled several new applications, including a partnership with the world’s largest advertising group, WPP, for generative AI-enabled content for digital advertising.