Following his big GTC 2024 keynote where he announced the new Blackwell GPU architecture, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang answered several questions as part of a Q&A session with the press. Tom’s Hardware has reported an interesting tidbit regarding the NVIDIA CEO’s prediction for the future of AI in gaming: he reckons that in ten years or even less than that, AI could generate all of a game’s pixels in real time.
I think with almost, almost everything in technology, the S curve is not longer than a decade once it becomes true, once it becomes practical and better. And, of course, ChatGPT is not only practical; in most cases, it’s better. I think it’s less than ten years away. In ten year’s time, you’re at the other end of that S curve. In five years from now, you’re probably right in the middle where everything is changing in real-time, and everybody’s going, ‘Oh, look at that, this is happening.’ And so you just got to decide, are we two years into it, into that ten years? Probably. We’re probably already two years into it. And so I would say that within the next five to ten years, somewhere in between, it’s largely the case.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang apparently has a rather optimistic view compared to his fellow employee Bryan Catanzaro, NVIDIA’s VP of Applied Deep Learning Research and the man behind DLSS. Around six months ago, Catanzaro estimated that DLSS ’10’ could deliver fully neural rendering:
I do not believe that AI is gonna build games in a way where you just write a paragraph about making a cyberpunk game and then pop comes out something as good as Cyberpunk 2077. I do think that, let’s say, DLSS 10 in the far future is going to be a completely neural rendering system that interfaces with a game engine in different ways, and because of that, it’s going to be more immersive and more beautiful.
It’s important to note that NVIDIA DLSS 1.0 launched in February 2019. While version 2.0 took about a year to be released, version 3.0 only happened two and a half years later. As such, it may well take more than ten years to get to DLSS 10.
Regardless, NVIDIA is clearly invested in the long haul for all things AI, starting with its gaming applications. During the aforementioned GTC 2024 keynote, the NVIDIA CEO introduced a new AI NPC demo titled Covert Protocol. The project was created with the NVIDIA Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) and Inworld AI technology; the same combination was also featured in GDC 2024’s Ubisoft NEO NPCs demo.
