NVIDIA announces updates to AI platform and new program
NVIDIA has announced significant updates to its AI platform, and the launch of its AI Accelerated program focused on the performance and reliability of the company's AI applications.
NVIDIA's AI platform is a software suite for advancing workloads, including speech, recommender system, and hyperscale inference.
The company explains that its AI Accelerated program helps ensure the performance and reliability of AI applications developed by NVIDIA's software and solution partners by increasing visibility to a wide range of AI-accelerated applications.
Furthermore, Adobe, Red Hat and VMware are among the more than 100 partners participating in the program at launch.
"NVIDIA AI is the software toolbox of the world's AI community, from AI researchers and data scientists, to data and machine learning operations teams," NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang says.
"Our GTC 2022 release is massive. Whether it's creating more engaging chatbots and virtual assistants, building smarter recommendations to help consumers make better purchasing decisions, or orchestrating AI services at the largest scales, your superpowered gem is in NVIDIA AI.
Freely available for developers, NVIDIA AI includes NVIDIA Riva for speech AI and NVIDIA Merlin for smart recommendations, both of which are now generally available.
Additionally, updates have been made across the software suite, including tools such as the NVIDIA Triton, NeMo, Maxine and TAO Toolkit.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise 2.0 is also now optimised, certified and supported across every major data center and cloud platform, including bare-metal servers, virtualised infrastructure and CPU-only systems.
In addition, the suite is now supported with Red Hat OpenShift and VMware vSphere with Tanzu.
NVIDIA AI Enterprise 2.0 also introduces more NVIDIA AI software containers to support training and inference. The NVIDIA TAO Toolkit supports enterprise developers to fine-tune and optimise NVIDIA pre-trained AI models. This facilitates a more straightforward creation of custom, production-ready models without AI expertise or extensive training data. The latest NVIDIA Triton Inference Server release is also included in the software suite.
NVIDIA's AI SDKs and their latest updates include:
NVIDIA Triton: A versatile open source hyperscale model inference solution. Updates in the latest release include a Model Navigator for accelerated deployment of optimised models, Management Service for efficient scaling in Kubernetes, and Forest Inference Library enabling inference on tree-based models with explainability for fast, optimised and scalable AI in every application.
NVIDIA Riva 2.0: A speech AI SDK that includes pre-trained models containing recognition rates, enabling developers to customise real-time speech AI applications for their industry with 2x better accuracy than generic services. Riva 2.0 also comes with speech recognition in seven languages, human-like deep learning-based text-to-speech with male and female voices, and custom tuning with NVIDIA TAO Toolkit. NVIDIA also announced NVIDIA Riva Enterprise, a paid offering that includes enterprise support from NVIDIA.
NVIDIA NeMo Megatron 0.9: A framework for training large language models that allows researchers and companies to train any model to convergence and scale to trillions of parameters for applications such as conversational AI, recommenders and genomics. The latest version includes new optimisations and capabilities that shorten end-to-end development and training time and increase cloud training support.
NVIDIA Merlin 1.0: An accelerated, end-to-end recommender AI framework to build high-performing recommenders at scale. Merlin Models and Merlin Systems are the two new libraries included in the latest release. These allow data scientists and machine learning engineers to quickly understand which features and models best fit their use case and establish the appropriate recommender pipelines as microservices.
NVIDIA Maxine: An audio and video quality enhancement SDK that reinvents real-time communications with AI and introduces acoustic echo cancellation and audio super resolution. NVIDIA explains that the two new features enhance audio quality leading to a clearer communication experience.
