Where does the future lie? Perhaps it is enough to just look at this number: 3,000,000,000,000. A three with twelve zeros, 3,000 billion dollars – that’s how much and a little more three American technology companies are worth on the stock market. Microsoft, the largest software provider in the world, Apple, which makes the most money from devices like the iPhone, and finally the chip designer Nvidia. It has now briefly overtaken Apple – but for Microsoft it was not quite enough.
Apple has been at the top for a while, Microsoft has worked its way there slowly and somewhat under the radar, but Nvidia’s rise came as something of a surprise. However, it was not entirely without plan that Nvidia’s chips would become almost indispensable in the very place where the hottest product in the tech world is being developed: artificial intelligence.
Nvidia, now a hyped stock, was once only known to people who wanted more from their computers than spreadsheets, emails and Word files. Namely games with high-resolution graphics, the more photorealistic the better. Nvidia, co-founded by an immigrant from Taiwan, Jen-Hsun Huang, who now calls himself Jensen, supplied the chips for this. They drive the so-called graphics cards, which are inserted into the expansion slots of computers in order to experience particularly realistic game worlds.
The difference to normal computer main chips: The graphics processing units (GPU) contain many individual processing cores that can work in parallel. The images of the games are, to put it simply, divided into many individual sections, each core only calculates a small part, but at the same time as the other cores. This meant that the game worlds could contain more and more details. Today, the chips can even calculate the paths of light rays and thus display reflections extremely realistically. Just 15 years ago, a small computer farm – and a day’s time – was needed to create a single image like this. Today, dozens of them are spit out every second.
Nvidia recognized quite early on that the graphics cards were not only suitable for virtual car racing or monster hunting in dark basements, but also for other types of calculations. The California-based company provided programming tools for this purpose. This software, called Cuda, made it possible to really use the special capabilities of the graphics processors. This also included the complex calculations for cryptocurrencies. At the height of the crypto hype, the prices of graphics cards skyrocketed and there were supply bottlenecks.
But the real hype came with artificial intelligence. AI researchers discovered a few years ago that graphics processors were well suited to handling the calculation processes consisting of many small individual steps with which AI models such as Chat-GPT and others are trained on the one hand and can interpret and answer user queries on the other. The many parallel processing units and the associated software made Nvidia the preferred tool of AI companies.
How long will this continue?
Of course, the question is how long this can continue. Google, a very serious contender for AI dominance, has long been developing its own chips, as has Microsoft, and Apple for some time. But the latecomers, as powerful as they are, have a backlog to catch up to. And Nvidia still offers the most powerful package with its chips and the software to go with them. Which is why companies that want to use AI have little choice but to buy from Huang. He enjoys it. When OpenAI, the company behind Chat-GPT, recently presented its latest products, the company proudly announced that Jensen Huang had personally brought the latest of its chips.
With all the AI hype, little has been heard from Apple so far. But that is likely to change soon. Next Monday evening German time, Apple’s conference for software developers, the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), begins at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino. Apple CEO Tim Cook is expected to at least hint at how artificial intelligence – and other technologies – can change the company’s products. First and foremost, of course, the iPhone, which is still Apple’s most important product. It is expected to If you believe preliminary reportsmutate into an “IntelliPhone”.
The move is long overdue. Apple has long been facing criticism for the fact that its virtual assistant Siri, which was once presented with much fanfare, has not learned much in the past decade. The IntelliPhone is intended to change that, as it could also incorporate virtual and augmented reality (VR, AR). The billions invested in the development of Apple’s data glasses could also be useful here – the device itself is not a mass product. AI, VR, AR – what will be included in version 18 of iOS, Apple’s operating system for the iPhone, could be crucial for the future of the company. It has often been accused of lacking creativity. So far, this has not done Apple any harm. Twelve zeros are a weighty argument.