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AI Power Robotics Technology

Nvidia Launches AI Computer To Give Autonomous Robots Better Brains (theverge.com) 85

Posted by BeauHD from the it's-what's-on-the-inside-that-counts dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: At Computex 2018, Nvidia unveiled two new products: Nvidia Isaac, a new developer platform, and the Jetson Xavier, an AI computer, both built to power autonomous robots. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Isaac and Jetson Xavier were designed to capture the next stage of AI innovation as it moves from software running in the cloud to robots that navigate the real world. The Isaac platform is a set of software tools that will make it simpler for companies to develop and train robots. It includes a collection of APIs to connect to 3D cameras and sensors; a library of AI accelerators to keep algorithms running smoothly and without lag; and a new simulation environment, Isaac Sim, for training and testing bots in a virtual space. Doing so is quicker and safer than IRL testing, but it can't match the complexity of the real world.

But the heart of the Isaac platform is Nvidia's new Jetson Xavier computer, an incredibly compact piece of hardware that's comprised of a number of processing components. These include a Volta Tensor Core GPU, an eight-core ARM64 CPU, two NVDLA deep learning accelerators, and processors for static images and video. In total, Jetson Xavier contains more than 9 billion transistors and delivers over 30 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of compute. And it consumes just 30 watts of power, which is half of the electricity used by the average light bulb. The cost of one Jetson Xavier (along with access to the Isaac platform) is $1,299, and Huang claims the computer provides the same processing power as a $10,000 workstation "AI, in combination with sensors and actuators, will be the brain of a new generation of autonomous machines," said Huang. "Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more."
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Nvidia Launches AI Computer To Give Autonomous Robots Better Brains More

Nvidia Launches AI Computer To Give Autonomous Robots Better Brains

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  • The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Monday June 04, 2018 @04:20PM (#56727516) Journal
    I swear to you all.. it's like everyone read TMIAHM, and actually believes that if you hook together enough hardware, it'll magically become a sentient self-aware synthetic mind like Mike in the book. Sorry, doesn't work that way, and until we solve the riddle of sentience, all these 'deep learning algorithms' will always fall short of whatever expectations you might have, no matter how much hardware you throw at it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )
      Nature managed to do it, supposedly without understanding anything about what it was doing.

      • Nature managed to do it IN A FEW MILLION YEARS OF EVOLUTION

        Fixed that for you. Also these machines don't evolve, we build them. They don't reproduce, there's no natural selection, just us idiot arrogant humans, thinking we can do an end-run around all of it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )

          Machines evolve.... that they don't do so by entirely natural processes on their own is immaterial.

          Just look at the past 50 years of computing... you can't tell me that machines don't evolve. The fact that we are the ones evolving them is immaterial.

          My point is that I expect that an intelligence-directed course of evolution should be much faster than an undirected one... so I don't think there's any reason that we won't see AI happen some day, and it might not be even very long form now. Honestly, I'

          • We can't 'direct' something that we don't understand. We haven't got a clue how the phenomenon of 'consciousness' 'self awareness' or 'sentience' actually works in our own brains; the current approach in my opinion is fatally flawed and will not ever produce these phenomenon; it's like a million monkeys mashing keys on a million typewriters for a million years, expecting to get a duplication of Shakespeares' works. If and when we have the instrumentation to understand how our own brains produce these phenom

            • Re:The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress/"Mike" (Score:4, Insightful)

              by mark-t ( 151149 ) <markt.nerdflat@com> on Monday June 04, 2018 @06:04PM (#56727932) Journal

              We can't 'direct' something that we don't understand

              Well, it's only true to say that we don't understand it fully. That's not the same thing as saying we don't understand it at all. And it's certainly not the same thing as saying that we are necessarily far away from understanding it sufficiently to artificially replicate it.

              I mean, starting from the time that man started building machines, we managed to create flying machines in a barely negligible *fraction* of the time that it took nature to pull it off, for instance.

              Again, given that nature managed to create something intelligent within a a billion or so years without *ANY* intelligence applied to the process whatsoever, I'd suggest that's not a far stretch to suggest that we might be able to outpace it in that regard as well.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AHuxley ( 892839 )
                The only understanding needed is how to get more gov/mil funding for AI this decade.
                • Congratulations, you've got the message: Marketing hype drives all of it. There's already so much invested in something the likely mistakenly thought was going to be another simple development cycle, and like the bridge in Zork, they get 99.999% of the way to the other side, only to find that they can't seem to get to 100%.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Anonymous Coward

                Kind of leaving out that there were also *trillions* of experimenters in that there process aren't you? You have a rather large multiplier you're ignoring.

              • Flight is easy by comparison. All you need to observe how flight works, really, is just your eyes. A camera would help. A movie camera would help even more. A wind tunnel helps with experiments, as would a number of other purely physical measuring devices. Do you see where I'm going with this? Flight is a purely physical thing that happens on a macroscopic scale. How a human brain works is on a microscopic scale. Furthermore you can't dismantle a brain and expect to get anything useful from it so far as ho

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward

              "Artificial Intelligence" is not the same thing as "consciousness, self-awareness, or sentience."

              You are fixated on a definition that is wrong, and white-knuckling an enormous straw-man fallacy.

              Yes, we don't have synthetic consciousness, and perhaps never will. But we already have artificial intelligence, and it is getting better every day.

              • What I'm 'fixated' on, if I actually am (which I'm not) is that the whole approach to so-called 'AI' is completely wrong and a dead end. Furthermore for some of the tasks they want to use it for (SDC's I'm looking at YOU), which need to operate in a world purpose-built for humans, not machines, it NEEDS to UNDERSTAND US, not be the vague half-assed 'deep learning' crap they keep trotting out. It's not cutting it now and I do not believe it will cut it, EVER. Disagree with me all you want, argue with me all

                • ... the whole approach to so-called 'AI' is completely wrong and a dead end.

                  LOL - only if you don't understand the difference between Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), which you've made painfully clear that you are totally ignorant of.

                  • Oh fuck off. You don't work in any such field yourself, you're not an AI researcher, you're not a neuroscientist, so you don't know a goddamned thing yourself.

                    • Oh fuck off.

                      Ad Hominem, so clearly you're an idiot

                      You don't work in any such field yourself,

                      I do

                      you're not an AI researcher,

                      I am

                      you're not a neuroscientist,

                      I earned an MSc at the Center for Neuroscience at Queen's University

                      ... so you don't know a goddamned thing yourself.

                      Wow, you make so many unwarranted assumptions you'd be hard pressed to argue your way out of a wet paper bag. You don't know shit about me and everything you assumed you got wrong. All you've done here is prove how much of an idiot you are.

            • the current approach in my opinion is fatally flawed

              And you have a better method ?

            • We haven't got a clue how the phenomenon of 'consciousness' 'self awareness' or 'sentience' actually works in our own brains;

              Well, this is just utter bullshit. We have plenty of clues to how it works, and some pretty good ideas on how to recreate it and what properties it must have.

              This is the kind of unmitigated nonsense that philosophers usually spill when they are completely ignorant of the current state of scientific understanding.

              Lastly, you obviously don't know what "sentience" means: it is simply the ability to have sensations, and we understand that quite well.

          • Just look at the past 50 years of computing... you can't tell me that machines don't evolve.
            No, they don't evolve. We get better skilled in making them.
            And as long as not a human is building a sentient machine, machines never will be sentient.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mark-t ( 151149 )
              I said that they don't evolve on their own, but that's not the same thing as not evolving at all. Or do you think that the term is invalid outside of any context of reproductive evolution?

              • Evolve implies it is evolving on its own. Well, at least in German, might be different in English (we use the same world).

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AHuxley ( 892839 )
            Just doing fast sorting on costs of data is not good evolve people are expecting. Thats just more hardware and software funding providing faster results from larger existing data sets.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by zifn4b ( 1040588 )

        Nature managed to do it, supposedly without understanding anything about what it was doing.

        The complexity of the universe is far more complex than your brain. Unfortunately with the Dunning Kruger effect [wikipedia.org] running afoul (we should teach that to the machines too) it's hard for you to comprehend.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Here's the thing:

      Intelligence != Sentience

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by taustin ( 171655 )

      "Deep learning algorithm" actually means "statistical analysis applied in a slightly fuzzy way." And not really much more.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jma05 ( 897351 )

      > all these 'deep learning algorithms' will always fall short of whatever expectations you might have

      Actually, they have exceeded expectations so far,

      None of the actual researchers who work on these worry about these going sentient at this level, only the Gates and Musk types.

      Actual researchers simply see these as slightly deeper statistical learning systems and are just concerned about building models with better classification accuracy. That itself is tremendously powerful TODAY to keep working on them

    • Humans can do magically a lot more than apes, and pretty much all that happened is that our brains got bigger.

    • Not quite. It takes a known and finite amount of computronium to use CAD to emulate the electro-chemical processes in the human brain. When the structure of the human brain is known -- even if it's not understood -- a computer with that amount of power will be able to emulate human intelligence. That's the high end. There are much more efficient methods, but at that point a computer will definitively have the intelligence of a human.
  • Ill belive that once they get something that works in the real world outside of kicking as at video games.

    In the real world computers can't even drive a car which even the dumbest among us can do.

    • Dumb people don't drive cars very well at all. In fact if we didn't have laws against it and extreme enforcement, the levels of drunk driving would be significantly higher.

  • https://developer.nvidia.com/e... [nvidia.com]
    TLDR: 10x better power efficiency than the TX2 and 20x the performance.

  • Average lightbulbs don't use 60 watts (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bryansix ( 761547 ) on Monday June 04, 2018 @04:44PM (#56727630) Homepage
    It's 2018 and most of by lightbulbs use between 8 and 15 watts each and contain only a single LED. Yes this computer is energy efficient but lets ditch the anachronisms.
    • So the average diode doesn't use 60 watts. Noted.

  • It strikes me that any system for automating a robot that is relatively small and low power is likely to have great attributes for creating personal augmentation systems. The basic requirements of personal augmentation systems include analyzing the surroundings and increasing the person's situational awareness or responsiveness in some way. The only thing this is missing is the features required to deliver the feedback to the individual. Presumably, they aren't missing the outputs to help control devices au

  • How about releasing the source under an Open/Free Source licence so all non Microsoft/Apple OSs can use your cards. That will help a lot more people than any AI will.

    I got burned once (had to buy a new video board), will never buy anything with Nvidia until the above happens

  • Am I the only one who sees "Someday, there will be billions of intelligent machines in manufacturing, home delivery, warehouse logistics and much more." and translates that to "some day there will be billions of unemployed"?

    Can someone PLEASE wake up those idiots and make them understand that ROBOTS do not buy PRODUCTS?

    • ... ROBOTS do not buy PRODUCTS?

      Huh, and I'm sure we were all going to pay them *salaries* until you pointed this out. You must be a genius or something.

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