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- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang highlighted robots — again — at a Taiwan tech conference Sunday.
- He predicted mass production of self-driving cars and humanoid robots in the coming years.
- Nvidia makes software and hardware for robots.
Jensen Huang really loves robots.
The Nvidia CEO paraded nine human-like robots on stage earlier this year. He highlighted them again in a Sunday speech at a Taiwan tech conference, saying that two kinds of robots in particular will be "very high volume." These are self-driving cars and humanoid robots, he said.
"The next wave of AI is physical AI. AI that understands the laws of physics. AI that can work among us," a black jacket-clad Huang said. "Everything is going to be robotic. All of the factories will be robotic. The factories will orchestrate robots and those robots will be building products that are robotic."
Chip giant Nvidia has much to gain from wide robot adoption: Its software and hardware can be used in production, training, and ongoing use of the robots.
The company built an operating system for self-driving cars and will start producing cars in a partnership with Mercedes next year, Huang said Sunday.
Nvidia also created an operating system for robots to learn in virtual environments. Before robots work in the physical world, their systems can be refined in a "robot gym," Huang said, where they fine-tune everything from motor skills, like grasping objects, to navigating environments, like moving around warehouses.
"The easiest robot to adapt into the world are human or robots because we built the world for us. We also have the most amount of data to train these robots than other types of robots because we have the same physique," Huang said.
In March, he called building models for robots "one of the most exciting problems to solve in AI today."
The company is also investing in robot startups, such as $50 million to Figure AI, which is building robots for dangerous warehouse jobs.
"This isn't the future. This is happening now," Huang said on Sunday.
Nvidia's stock is up 180% in the last year.