Nvidia launched Nemotron, a ‘ChatGPT killer’ + e-commerce impact

Nvidia has launched a customized and optimized version of Llama 3.1 baptized 'Nemotron'. This 70-billion-parameter model has shaken the field of AI, having beaten the language models GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonic in several benchmarks. 

Now, if you are involved in the complex world of e-commerce, you should know about Nvidia. But if the name doesn't ring a bell, let us quickly review what and who Nvidia is and why it is fundamental for the future of e-commerce.

Long ago, on April 5, 1993, Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem decided to create a company to bring 3D graphics to the gaming and multimedia markets. This required the creation of dedicated graphic processing units (GPUs), a kind of specialized microchip designed to process graphics and create 3D-rendered elements. 

Fast-forward 30 years, and Nvidia is currently the world’s most powerful AI company. Currently, Nvidia is the leading manufacturer of chips for generative AI and controls 80% of the global GPU semiconductor chip market.

Yes, it's Nvidia, not ChatGPT, and not Microsoft. It has always been Nvidia. Why? A couple of decades ago, someone realized that the GPU’s chips were perfect for handling and performing technical calculations faster and with greater energy efficiency than CPUs, the standard processing units inside our computers and electronic devices. 

This meant that you could use a GPU for AI - or any other process requiring heavy technical calculations - instead of a CPU, so long as you could ‘code your way into it’ by creating the appropriate software to run those calculations through the GPU. 

Without entering into a complex technical explanation of why GPUs make sense for AI, let’s just say that GPUs usually have up to 1000s of cores, whereas current CPUs max out at 64 cores. For multitasking processes, the GPUs are the best. 

Back to the present, Nvidia has become such a beast of a company precisely because of that. What originally was meant to be a graphic card company aimed at the video game industry has found itself producing GPUs used in almost everything: from Tesla autopilots to ICBM warheads, the International Space Station's new control systems, and of course… almost all the AI processors currently in the market. 

So far, Nvidia has been incredibly profitable by creating the hardware, the chips, and the parts needed to assemble the GPUs. How profitable, you ask? The company is currently worth 41,182 million dollars, roughly about 40 billion. But that is their value so far… because, and that’s why we started by saying that ‘if you are involved in e-commerce, you should know Nvidia, ’ the company has recently decided to go the full mile and close the cycle: not only produce the hardware for AI but also the AI software itself. Enter Nemotron, Nvidia’s ChatGPT killer. 

Nvidia Nemotron: More efficient and Open Source

Nemotron is a game-changer for AI practical applications, especially for e-commerce. Why? For starters, Nemotron is an open-source model, meaning anyone can work with it, modify it, or customize it. There is no proprietary licensing on the software. Secondly, it is far more efficient than ChatGPT, achieving more processes with fewer parameters, which makes it ideal for e-commerce operations. 

Remember that this AI model, Nemotron, comes directly from the world’s leading GPU manufacturers. You can safely claim that Nvidia is the best GPU company ever. In fact, they invented GPUs in 1990 and still remain leaders in this technology. 

To put it into perspective, it is as if a caveman had invented the wheel as a toy for kids, and suddenly, the rest of the tribe realized its potential. But other cavemen don't know how to carve wheels out of the stone. That’s Nvidia's current scenario, with the difference that in Nvidia's case—fortunately for us—there are ‘other wheel carving cavemen,’ namely AMD. 

Still, Nvidia remains the unquestionable leader: it has more experience, better components, and higher tech. 

And these capabilities haven't gone unnoticed by the e-commerce world. This is so much so that in June 2024, Nvidia's market capitalization reached US$3 trillion, mostly because of Nvidia's potential as an integral AI solutions company. 

Nvidia's massive impact on e-commerce

Now, what exactly can Nvidia AI solutions offer to the world of e-commerce? According to all the major players in the industry, a lot. 

So much so that Nvidia AI—either chips or software—is already becoming an integral part of almost all of the AI solutions for e-commerce. From warehouse management to chatbots, companies like Shopify, Amazon, and Walmart use Nvidia hardware or Nvidia software—and often both—to build their AI support solutions for businesses and merchants.

According to a new survey conducted by NVIDIA, ninety-eight percent of retailers plan to invest in generative AI in the next 18 months.

That makes retail one of the industries racing fastest to adopt generative AI to ramp up productivity, transform customer experiences, and improve efficiency.

Early deployments in the retail industry include personalized shopping advisors and adaptive advertising, with retailers initially testing off-the-shelf models like GPT-4 from OpenAI.

However, many are now realizing the value of developing custom models trained on their proprietary data to achieve brand-appropriate tone and personalized results in a scalable, cost-effective way.

Before building them, companies must first consider a variety of questions: whether to opt for an open-source, closed-source, or enterprise model; how they plan to train and deploy the models; how to host them; and, most importantly, how to ensure future innovations and new products can be easily incorporated into them.

New offerings like NVIDIA AI Foundations, a curated collection of optimized, enterprise-grade foundation models from NVIDIA, and leading open-source pre-trained models give retail companies the building blocks they need to construct their custom models. With NVIDIA NeMo, an end-to-end platform for large language model development, retailers can customize and deploy their models at scale using the latest state-of-the-art techniques.

All of this, with the support of the world's biggest GPU producer, makes a great ‘seal of quality’ for any AI software development, as compatibility under the Nvidia Nemotron framework should never be an issue. On top of that, a trillion-dollar company that holds the entire global market of hardware for AI will support the open-source model. A perfect combination. 

That’s why Nvidia Nemotron could be the missing building block for a global standardized AI solution that could easily be implemented for e-commerce on a planetary scale. If this happens, Nvidia could become a household name and one of the most essential businesses in mankind's history. Only time will tell.