About Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote address: Rut roh!

An opinion piece in Techradar is about a hair raising monster that Nvidia just gave birth to:

I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote 

and it made my blood run cold

Nvidia's pre-Computex keynote address was certainly something, and none of it felt good

I don't think Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is a bad guy, or that he has nefarious plans for Nvidia, but the most consequential villains in history are rarely evil. They just go down a terribly wrong path, and end up leaving totally forseeable, but ultimately inevitable ruin in their wake.

While the star of the show might have been Nvidia Blackwell, Nvidia's latest data center processor that will likely be bought up far faster than they can ever be produced, there were a host of other AI technologies that Nvidia is working on that will be supercharged by its new hardware. All of it will likely generate enormous profits for Nvidia and its shareholders, and while I don't give financial advice, I can say that if you're an Nvidia shareholder, you were likely thrilled by Sunday's keynote presentation.

For everyone else, however, all I saw was the end of the last few glaciers on Earth and the mass displacement of people that will result from the lack of drinking water; the absolutely massive disruption to the global workforce that 'digital humans' are likely to produce; and ultimately a vision for the future that centers capital-T Technology as the ultimate end goal of human civilization rather than the 8 billion humans and counting who will have to live — and a great many will die before the end — in the world these technologies will ultimately produce with absolutely no input from any of us.

There was something that Huang said during the keynote that shocked me into a mild panic. Nvidia's Blackwell cluster, which will come with eight GPUs, pulls down 15kW of power. That's 15,000 watts of power. Divided by eight, that's 1,875 watts per GPU.

The current-gen Hopper data center chips draw up to 1,000W, so Nvidia Blackwell is nearly doubling the power consumption of these chips. Data center energy usage is already out of control, but Blackwell is going to pour jet fuel on what is already an uncontained wildfire.

Worse still, Huang said that in the future, he expects to see millions of these kinds of AI processors in use at data centers around the world.

One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.

Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.  

I always feared that the AI data center boom was likely going to make the looming climate catastrophe inevitable, but there was something about seeing it all presented on a platter with a smile and an excited presentation that struck me as more than just tone-deaf. It was damn near revolting. 

Greetings, Earthlings! 

You are all fired!

TTFN! (Ta Ta for now!)

When I saw Nvidia ACE at CES 2024, I was genuinely impressed by the potential for this technology to make video games feel more dynamic and alive. I should have known that we're far more likely to see Nvidia ACE at the checkout counter than in any PC games any time soon.

In one segment of the keynote, Huang talked about the potential for Nvidia ACE to power 'digital humans' that companies can use to serve as customer service agents, be the face of an interior design project, and more. This makes absolute sense, since who are we kidding, Nvidia ACE for video games won't really make all that much money.

However, if a company wants to fire 90% of its customer service staff and replace it with an Nvidia ACE-powered avatar that never sleeps, never eats, never complains about low pay or poor working conditions, and can be licensed for a fee that is lower than the cost of the labor it is replacing, well, I don't have to tell you how that is going to go. 

Next time you go into a fast food restaurant to order from a digital kiosk, your order will probably soon come out of a hole in the wall with a 'digital human' on a screen to pretend that it's actually serving you your food. Behind the wall, an army of robots, also powered by new Nvidia robotics processors, will assemble your food, no humans needed.  

I'm going to give Huang and all the other tech CEOs with their foot on the gas of the AI data center boom the benefit of the doubt here and say that this isn't about pure greed at the end of the day. Let's say that all of these visionary leaders, our economic elite, are just so excited about the potential of this technology that they cannot help themselves. They have to see it through, regretting the costs incurred by others along the way to an ultimate greater good sometime in the future.

I think the worst part of Huang's keynote wasn't that none of this mattered, it's that I don't think anyone in Huang's position is really thinking about any of this at all. I hope they're not, which at least means it's possible they can be convinced to change course. The alternative is that they do not care, which is a far darker problem for the world.

I've read dozens of AI-induced doomsday articles. This one feels significantly more ominous than any of the past predictions. I mean really folks, 1.875 gigawatts of power is a heck of a lot of juice to run those skull machines.

I just cannot shake the queasy feeling of deep rut roh! I get from this particular opinion piece. 

Well, on the bright side, at least the digital human who gathers the workers in the soon to be obsolete break room will be empathetic when it tells all the real humans they have been laid off.

By Germaine: Rather disturbed watchdog of the public interest