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Nvidia already sells boatloads of computer chips to every major proprietary building company artificial intelligence models. But now, at a time when public interest in open source and do-it-yourself artificial intelligence is on the rise, the company announced that it will also begin offering a “personal AI supercomputer” later this year starting at $3,000 that anyone can use at home or in the office
Nvidia’s new typing machine, called Digits, will go on sale in May and is about the size of a small book. It contains an Nvidia “superchip” called the GB10 Grace Blackwell optimized to accelerate the calculations needed to train and run AI models, and comes equipped with 128GB of unified memory and up to 4TB of NVMe storage for managing particularly large AI programs.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, announced the new system, along with several other AI offerings, during a keynote speech today at CESan annual confab for the IT industry held in Las Vegas (you can check out all the biggest announcements on the WIRED CES live blog).
“Putting an AI supercomputer on the desks of every data scientist, AI researcher and student enables them to engage and shape the age of AI,” Huang said in a statement released ahead of his keynote.
Nvidia says the Digits machine, which stands for “deep learning GPU intelligence training system,” will be able to run a single large language model with up to 200 billion parameters, a rough measure of the complexity and size of a model To do this today, you need to rent space from a cloud provider like AWS or Microsoft, or build a custom system with a handful of chips designed to run AI. If two Cifre machines are connected with a proprietary high-speed interconnect link, Nvidia says they will be able to run the more capable available version of Meta’s open source Llama model, which has 405 billion parameters.
The numbers will make it easier for hobbyists and researchers to experiment with models that approach the basic capabilities of GPT-4 by OpenAI o Google Gemini in their offices or basement. But the best versions of those proprietary models, housed in giant Microsoft and Google data centers, are likely bigger and more powerful than Digits could handle.
Nvidia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the It’s booming. Its stock price has soared in recent years as tech companies clamor to buy large quantities of the advanced hardware chips it produces, a crucial ingredient for the development of cutting-edge AI. The company has demonstrated the ability to make hardware and software optimized for AI, and its product roadmap has become an important signal of where the industry is expected to go next.
When released, Digits will be the most powerful consumer computing hardware Nvidia offers. It already sells a range of AI development chipsets known as Jetson starting at around $250. These can run smaller AI models and be used as a mini desktop computer or installed on a robot for testing various AI programs.
