Move over, Elon Musk: Nvidia says 2024 is the year of the 'humanoid' robot

Nvidia on Mon announced a new AI model designed to power robots.

The company at the same time unveiled a new computer designed to power that model.

The end of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's two-hour keynote address at the company's developer conference Monday was taken over by a handful of robots that walked out on stage, beeping and whistling at Huang before settling down to watch him finish the address.

The robots' appearance followed an announcement from Huang of a robotics project the company called GR00T - which stands for Generalist Robot 00 Technology.

Groot refers to a new foundation model designed by Nvidia to bring artificial intelligence and robotics together; Huang said the model will enable robots both to understand natural language and to learn physical movements by observing and emulating humans.

"The soul of Nvidia: The intersection of computer graphics, physics, artificial intelligence," Huang said. "It all came to bear at this moment."

The model will be powered by a new computer - also unveiled at Monday's conference - called Jetson Thor, a GPU designed to power multimodal generative AI efforts.