Jensen Huang’s ‘Digital Brains’ Rant Is… Concerning
What would you like your future job to be: building brains, or building brains to go into the products that your company ships? Choose wisely, especially if you’re in Germany, because according to a bizarre vision of the future just shared by the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, these two nonsensical options are the essence of some kind of dichotomy that companies—German companies at least—will soon face. Or something like that? Honestly it’s not at all clear.
As part of the Invest in Germany Summit on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was speaking to—who else?—the Chancellor of Germany Friedrich Merz in the former Berlin power station known as Kraftwerk Berlin. The host of the event asked Huang to share a vision of the future of manufacturing.
Huang gamely opened up his third eye, and below is a transcript of what the Chip Lord blurted out:
“Every single company in the future will have two factories: the factory that is real, and the factory that is digital, and the factory that is digital will be so real that it might as well be real. If it manifests itself when you create the digital twin of your company—of your car company—that digital twin might as well be real. And so in the future, I believe that most people here in Germany will mostly work inside a digital twin of their company. They will build digital cars. Those cars will have digital brains. The manufacturing—the factories—will have digital, of course artificial intelligence, robots, building inside a robotic factory, building cars that will be robotic. And everything will be completely software-driven. Everything will be completely AI-driven. So every company will build two things: they will build brains, and the brains that go into the products that they ship.”
It sure sounds like Huang’s Berlin trip started with a chemically-enhanced all-nighter at Berghain before he swung by Kraftwerk, which—because this is Germany—is also a techno venue now. But Huang, who is 63, doesn’t have a reputation for being that kind of billionaire. Instead, it just sounds like Huang overlaid a “Germany” filter on a manic hodgepodge of some vintage Nvidia talking points (Though maybe the white wine he and Merz were sipping helped).
For instance, something like this factories-will-be-two-factories thing is a less coherent version of something he said in a keynote last year:
“Every industry, every company that has factories will have two factories in the future. The factory for what they build, and the factory for the mathematics, the factory for the AI.”
The concept of a digital factory that simulates every real factory seems to be referencing a feature in the Nvidia Agent Toolkit called Omniverse. In theory, Omniverse simulates robot workplaces for testing purposes, so what happens in the digital twin of a factory, if you will, can be deployed in a real factory.
Still, this is highly concentrated, Musk-level gibberish, spoken while the head of state of the world’s third largest economy nods along, and then tells him he’s “impressed” with what Nvidia is doing in his country. It doesn’t exactly send a message that the people in charge of our increasingly unequal and tech-driven world have everything under control and deserve our trust.