Project Gr00T Has Arrived, and We’ve Got Star Wars Droids!
I’m not a Star Wars person.
I couldn’t tell you the names of the planets or the ships or characters or whatever, and I’m good with that.
However, something I can tell you is that I’ve watched a Star Wars droid in action this week…and I mean a real one.
I’m not talking about one of the CGI ones or the glorified moving trashcans from the 1970s and 1980s.
Nvidia and Disney have worked together to create a very real, frighteningly accurate Star Wars Droid.
The Nvidia Presentation
I know that many of us have blinders for Disney, but if you pay attention to the business world at all, you know about Nvidia.
Historically deemed a graphics card manufacturer, Nvidia almost accidentally triggered the current AI gold rush.
Since then, Nvidia stock has surged an almost comical amount.
At the start of 2020, a single share was worth less than $60. As I type this today, that same share has increased to $887.
So, if you own lots of Nvidia stock, I congratulate you on your upcoming purchase of a private island.
The key beneficiary and cause of this growth is CEO Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia.
I realize that people aren’t supposed to like billionaire CEOs, but Huang is a bit of a different breed.
For starters, he’s funny. Also, he’s revered within his own company.
Remember that survey about the best CEOs in the world, the one where Bob Iger didn’t do great? Huang won that.
Then again, you’ll always be popular when you’ve made all your employees rich via stock options.
Also, other companies will want to work with you, which brings us to today’s Star Wars discussion.
Huang, whose net worth has nearly doubled from $42 billion to $78.6 billion since December 2023 (!), should be off buying volcano fortresses and trying to kill James Bond.
Instead, the affable businessperson appeared at the annual GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California.
His latest presentation was a tour de force demonstration of everything Nvidia has accomplished and where the company is headed.
Let’s Talk Star Wars Droids
The above video features the Disney part of Huang’s presentation.
I’d strongly encourage you to watch the clip, whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not. Simply stated, it’s the future of tech.
Huang stands side by side with AI-powered robots, the kind we’d ordinarily expect in a Battlestar Galactica episode.
Yes, Huang is testing Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics by taking the stage alongside actual, functional robots.
Importantly, two of them should look familiar to Star Wars fans.
Those are the BD units that first appeared in a 2019 Star Wars video game, followed by an episode of The Book of Boba Fett. It’s this thing:
Huang credits the creations as “amazing Disney research.”
However, the CEO notes that these droids are the product of the Nvidia Jetson Nano developer kit.
The droids learned human interactions via Isaac Sim, a robotics simulation program.
Their names are BD-X Orange and BD-X Green, and while one of them seemed a bit camera-shy, the tech wowed the crowd.
Over the past 24 hours, countless headlines have marveled at the realistic movements of these Droids.
In short, the technology already exists to create many of your favorites from the Star Wars universe.
Thanks to Nvidia’s AI innovations, Imagineers can program these devices to act in character as well!
Fittingly, Nvidia has named this technology Project Gr00t, although Disney fans would recognize it as at least vaguely reminiscent of Judy Hopps.
As a reminder, we’ve seen these before at the parks.
The big revelation here is how much AI programming they possess. They’re real!
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