Tech

Nvidia Reveals Its CEO Was Computer Generated in Keynote Speech

Nvidia pulled off a stunt to promote and showcase its latest technology by digitizing its CEO Jensen Huang in a conference keynote.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang

Graphics processor companyNvidia, maker of the currently almost impossible to purchase 3080 GPU, showcased its prowess at computer animation by sneaking a virtual replica of its CEO into a keynote speech.. 

On Wednesday, Nvidia revealed in a blog post that its CEO Jensen Huang did not do the keynote presentation at the company's GTC conference in April. At least part of it was actually led by a virtual replica of Huang, created by digitizing Huang with a truck full of DSLR cameras, and then animating him with the help of an AI, according to the company. Huang's kitchen, which has become Nvidia's venue for speaking to customers and investors since the beginning of the pandemic, was also entirely computer generated. It's not clear exactly which part of the keynote speech features CGI Huang (which is what makes the replica so impressive), but if you jump to this part of the presentation you can see Huang magically disappear and his kitchen explode into multiple different 3D models.

Advertisement

"To create a virtual Jensen, teams did a full face and body scan to create a 3D model, then trained an AI to mimic his gestures and expressions and applied some AI magic to make his clone realistic," Nvidia wrote in the blog post. "Digital Jensen was then brought into a replica of his kitchen that was deconstructed to reveal the holodeck within Omniverse, surprising the audience and making them question how much of the keynote was real, or rendered."

After this article was published, Nvidia updated its blog post, clarifying that “only 14 seconds of the hour and 48 minute presentation” were animated.

The company also published a video on Wednesday talking about how they made the GTC keynote, which included a section on the making of virtual Huang and his virtual kitchen.

Omniverse is a platform that incorporates various tools for engineers to create animations, which the company calls a "metaverse" for engineers. 

This story was updated with new information added by Nvidia to its blog post.