What would your future job be: building brains, or building brains for the products your company ships? Choose wisely, especially if you’re in Germany, because according to a bizarre vision of the future just shared by the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, these two absurd options are the essence of a kind of dichotomy that companies…German at least businesses – will soon be faced. Or something like that? Honestly, it’s not at all clear.
On Monday, as part of the Invest in Germany Summit, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang spoke with – who else? – German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in the former Berlin power station known as Kraftwerk Berlin. The event host asked Huang to share his vision for the future of the manufacturing industry.
Huang openly opened his third eye, and below is a transcript of what the Chip Lord blurted out:
“Every company of the future will have two factories: the factory that is real and the factory that is digital, and the factory that is digital will be so real that it might as well be. If this manifests itself when you create the digital twin of your company, of your car manufacturer, that digital twin might as well be real. And so in the future, I believe that most people here in Germany will mainly work in a digital twin of their company. They will build digital cars. These cars will have a digital brain. Manufacturing, factories will have digital, of course artificial intelligence, robots, constructions inside a robotic factory, cars that will be robotic and everything will be completely software driven. So each company will build two things: they will build brains and the brains that will go into the products that they ship.
It looks like Huang’s trip to Berlin began with a chemical-enriched all-nighter at Berghain before heading to Kraftwerk, which – because this is Germany – is also now a techno venue. But Huang, who is 63, does not have the reputation of being that a kind of billionaire. Instead, it just looks like Huang superimposed a “Germany” filter on a manic hodgepodge of some vintage Nvidia talking points (although maybe the white wine he and Merz were sipping on helped).
For example, something like this story of factories will be two factories is a less coherent version of something he said in a speech last year:
“Every industry, every company that has factories will have two factories in the future. The factory for what they build, and the factory for math, the factory for AI.”
The concept of a digital factory that simulates every real factory seems to refer to a feature in Nvidia Agent Toolkit called Omniverse. In theory, Omniverse simulates robotic workstations for testing purposes. digital twin of a factory, if you want, can be deployed in an actual factory.
Yet it’s highly concentrated, Musk-level gibberish, delivered while the head of state of the world’s third-largest economy nods, then tells him he’s “impressed” by what Nvidia is doing in his country. That doesn’t exactly send the message that those in charge of our increasingly unequal, tech-driven world have everything under control and deserve our trust.
Gn bussni
