Nvidia sells its chips in droves to all the manufacturers of its own artificial intelligence models, but its current circulation is aimed at open source and “do-it-yourself” AI. The company announced that this year it will offer a “personal supercomputer” starting at $3,000, which anyone can use in their home or office.
According to the announcement by its CEO Jensen Huang at CES, the largest technology event held in Las Vegas, Project DIGITS will go on sale in May and will be the size of a small book. The machine will be powered by GB10 Grace Blackwell super chipoptimized to speed up the calculations needed to train and run AI models, and comes equipped for 128 gigabytes unified memory and up to 4 terabytes NVMe storage to handle especially large AI programs.
On the desk of every scientist and student
“Putting an AI supercomputer on the table of every data scientist, researcher and student empowers them to participate in and shape the era of artificial intelligence,” Huang said in a statement released ahead of his speech. DIGITS stands for “deep learning GPU intelligence training system”and will be able to run a single large language model (LLM) with up to 200 billion parameters, a rough measure of the complexity and size of a model.
Accomplishing this feat would require renting space from a cloud service provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft, or building a custom system with a handful of chips designed to run AI. Nvidia explains that if two DIGITS machines are connected using a proprietary high-speed interconnect link, will be able to run the most capable version available of Meta’s open-source Llama model, which has 405 billion parameters.
DIGITS will make it easier for hobbyists and researchers to experiment with models that approach the basic capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 or Google’s Gemini in their offices or basements. Most likely, however, the best versions of those proprietary models, housed in gigantic data centers owned by Microsoft and Google, will be larger and more powerful than any task Nvidia’s machine can perform.
The new model is called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking and its developers describe it as a tool that “explicitly displays your thoughts.”
AI agents powered by Nvidia
Nvidia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom. In recent years, its share price has skyrocketed, technology giants buy its advanced chips from hardware in large quantities: a crucial ingredient for developing cutting-edge AI. The company has proven to be the expert in the manufacture of software and hardware optimized by artificial intelligence, and its product roadmap has become an important sign of where the industry is expected to go in the future.
When it comes to market, DIGITS will be the hardware most powerful consumer computer that Nvidia offers. The company already sells a range of chipsets for the development of artificial intelligence known by Jetson, which are offered starting at $250. They can run smaller AI models and be used as a minicomputer or installed in a robot to test different AI programs.
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