Getty Images, a global visual content creator and marketplace, today at CES released Generative AI by iStock, an affordable and commercially safe image generation service trained on the company’s creative library of licensed, proprietary data.
Built on NVIDIA Picasso, a foundry for custom AI models, Generative AI by iStock provides designers and businesses with a text-to-image generation tool to create ready-to-license visuals, with legal protection and usage rights for generated images included.
Alongside the release of the service on the iStock website, Getty Images is also making advanced inpainting and outpainting features available via application programming interfaces, launching on iStock.com and Gettyimages.com soon. Developers can seamlessly integrate the new APIs with creative applications to add people and objects to images, replace specific elements and expand images in a wide range of aspect ratios.
Create With Im-AI-gination
Generative AI by iStock is trained with NVIDIA Picasso on Getty Images’ vast creative library — including exclusive photos, illustrations and videos — providing users with a commercially safe way to generate visuals. Users can enter simple text prompts to generate photo-quality images at up to 4K resolution.
Inpainting and outpainting APIs, with Reflex feature coming soon.
New editing APIs give customers powerful control over their generated images.
The Inpainting feature allows users to mask a region of an image, then fill in the region with a person or object described via a text prompt.
Outpainting enables users to expand images to fit various aspect ratios, filling in new areas based on the context of the original image. This is a powerful tool to create assets with unique aspect ratios for advertising or social media promotion.
And coming soon, a Replace feature provides similar capabilities to Inpainting but with stricter adherence to the mask.
Transforming Visual Design
The NVIDIA Picasso foundry enables developers and service providers to seamlessly train, fine-tune, optimize and deploy generative AI models tailored to their visual design requirements. Developers can use their own AI models or train new ones using the NVIDIA Edify model architecture to generate images, videos, 3D assets, 360-degree high-dynamic-range imaging and physically based rendering materials from simple text prompts.
Using NVIDIA Picasso, Getty Images trained a bespoke Edify image generator based on its catalog of licensed images and videos to power the Generative AI by iStock service.
Customers can use Generative AI by iStock online today. Advanced editing features are now available via APIs and coming soon to the iStock website.
Whether building a super-capable truck or conjuring up a dream sports car, spending hours playing with online car configurators is easy.
With auto industry insiders predicting that most new vehicle purchases will move online by 2030, these configurators are more than just toys.
They’re crucial to the future of the world’s automakers — essential in showing off what their brand is all about, boosting average selling prices and helping customers select and personalize their vehicles.
It’s also a natural use case for the sophisticated simulation capabilities of NVIDIA Omniverse, a software platform for developing and deploying advanced 3D applications and pipelines based on OpenUSD. It provides the ability to instantly visualize changes to a car’s color or customize its interior with luxurious finishes.
Studies show that 80% of shoppers are drawn to brands that give them a personal touch while shopping.
Aiming to meet these customer demands, a burgeoning ecosystem of partners and customers is putting to work elements of Omniverse.
Key creative partners and developers like BITONE, Brickland, Configit, Katana Studio Ltd. (serving Craft Detroit), WPP and ZeroLight are pioneering Omniverse-powered configurators. And leading automakers such as Lotus are adopting these advanced solutions.
That’s because traditional auto configurators, often limited by pre-rendered images, experience difficulty achieving personalization and dynamic environment representation.
They use different kinds of data in various tools, such as static images of what users see on the website, lists of available options based on location, product codes and personal information.
These challenges extend from the consumer experience — often characterized by limited interactivity and realism — to back-end processes for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and agencies, where inflexibility and inefficiencies in updating configurators and repurposing assets are common.
Reconfiguring Configurators With NVIDIA Omniverse
Omniverse helps software developers and service providers streamline their work.
Service providers can now access the platform to craft state-of-the-art 3D experiences and showcase lifelike graphics and high-end, immersive environments with advanced lighting and textures.
And OEMs can benefit from a unified asset pipeline that simplifies the integration of design and engineering data for marketing purposes. Omniverse’s enhanced tools also allow them to quickly produce diverse marketing materials, boosting customer engagement through customized content.
Independent software vendors, or ISVs, can use the native OpenUSD platform as a foundation for creating scene construction tools — or to help develop tools for managing configuration variants.
With the NVIDIA Graphics Delivery Network (GDN) software development kit, high-quality, real-time NVIDIA RTX viewports can be embedded into web applications, ensuring seamless operation on nearly any device.
This, along with support for large-scale scenes and physically accurate graphics, allows developers to concentrate on enhancing the user experience without compromising quality on lower-spec machines.
Omniverse Cloud taps GDN, which uses NVIDIA’s global cloud-streaming infrastructure to deliver seamless access to high-fidelity 3D interactive experiences.
Configurators, when run on GDN, can be easily published at scale using the same GPU architecture on which they were developed and streamed to nearly any device.
All this means less redundancy in data prep, aggregated and accessible data, fewer manual pipeline updates and instant access for the entire intended audience.
Global Adoption by Innovators and Industry Leaders
Omniverse is powering a new era in automotive design and customer interaction, heralded by a vibrant ecosystem of partners and customers.
NVIDIA is bringing more games, membership options and innovative tech to its GeForce NOW cloud gaming service.
The next Activision and Blizzard titles to join the cloud, Diablo IV and Overwatch 2, will be coming soon. They’ll be joined by a host of top titles, including Capcom’s Exoprimal, HoYoverse’s Honkai: Star Rail and Mainframe Industries’ Pax Dei.
Available starting in February, new day passes for Ultimate and Priority memberships will offer full premium benefits one day at a time.
NVIDIA is also bringing G-SYNC technology to the cloud, raising cloud streaming performance while lowering latency and minimizing stuttering for the smoothest gameplay. Paired with new 60 and 120 fps streaming options for GFN Reflex mode, the two together make cloud gaming experiences nearly indistinguishable from local ones.
Plus, mobile gamers are getting a boost to 1440p resolution on Android phones. And Japan is the newest region to be operated by NVIDIA, which will soon enable gamers across the country to play their favorite PC games in the cloud with Ultimate performance.
Here Come the Games
The GeForce NOW catalog features many of the most popular PC games — over 1,800 titles from Steam, Xbox and supported PC Game Pass titles, Epic Games Store, Ubisoft, GOG.com and other digital stores. Backed by up to GeForce RTX 4080 GPU-class graphics, GeForce NOW is bringing even more top titles to the cloud from celebrated publishers.
The latest games from top developer Blizzard Entertainment — Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 — are coming soon to GeForce NOW. They join the recent release of Call of Duty, the first Activision game in the cloud, as part of a 10-year NVIDIA and Microsoft partnership.
Join the fight for Sanctuary.
Fight the forces of hell while discovering countless abilities to master, legendary loot to gather and nightmarish dungeons full of evil enemies to vanquish in Diablo IV. Experience the campaign solo or with friends in a shared open world as the dark, gripping story unfolds.
Team up and answer the call of heroes in “Overwatch 2.”
Team up and answer the call of heroes in Overwatch 2, a free-to-play shooter featuring 30+ epic heroes, each with game-changing abilities. Join the battle across dozens of futuristic maps inspired by real-world locations and master unique game modes in the always-on, ever-evolving, live game.
Members will soon be able to stream the Steam versions of Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 on nearly any device with the power of a GeForce RTX 4080 rig in the cloud, with support for the Battle.net launcher to follow.
The Astral Express is coming to GeForce NOW.
GeForce NOW also brings top role-playing games to the cloud. The immensely popular Honkai: Star Rail from HoYoverse will join Genshin Impact coming soon in the cloud. The space-fantasy RPG is set in a diverse universe filled with wonder, adventure and thrills, and expands the library of hit free-to-play titles for members. Plus, members can experience all the latest updates without worrying about download times.
Dinosaurs? Oh my.
Top publisher Capcom is working with NVIDIA to bring more of its hit titles to the cloud, including Exoprimal, an online, team-based action game that pits humanity’s cutting-edge exosuit technology against history’s most ferocious beasts: dinosaurs. Look forward to seeing it in the cloud on Jan. 18.
Ghosts do exist!
Mainframe Industries’ Pax Dei is a highly anticipated social sandbox massively multiplayer online game inspired by legends of the medieval era. It’s planned to release on GeForce NOW when it launches for PC.
Get ready to play these titles and more at high performance coming soon. Ultimate members will be able to stream at up to 4K resolution and 120 frames per second with support for NVIDIA DLSS and Reflex technology, and experience the action even on low-powered devices. Keep an eye out on GFN Thursdays for the latest on their release dates in the cloud.
Don’t Pass This Up
Day Passes, available in early February, will give gamers a fast pass to try out premium membership benefits before committing to one- or six-month memberships that offer better value. The passes provide access to all the same features as Priority and Ultimate members for 24 hours.
Day Pass users can experience RTX ON for supported games with Priority and Ultimate Day Passes. And Ultimate Day Pass users gain exclusive access to innovative technologies like NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, full ray tracing and NVIDIA Reflex.
Pssst, pass it on.
These new membership options let gamers freely choose when to tap into the cloud.
The Ultimate Day Pass will be available for $7.99 and the Priority Day Pass for $3.99. The 24 hours of continuous play will begin at purchase. Day Passes can be combined for continued access to GeForce NOW high-performance cloud streaming.
Let That Sync In
NVIDIA continues to push the boundaries for cloud gaming. The Ultimate membership tier introduced many cloud gaming firsts, from 240 fps to ultra-wide streaming, making gameplay with GeForce NOW — streaming from GeForce RTX 4080-powered servers — nearly identical to a local gaming experience.
Get in sync.
Coming soon, cloud G-SYNC technology will raise the bar even further, minimizing stutter and latency, with support for variable refresh rate monitors and fully optimized for G-SYNC-compatible monitors. With Cloud G-SYNC enabled, GeForce NOW will vary the display’s refresh rates to match the streaming rate, for the smoothest gameplay experience available from the cloud.
Ultimate members can also soon take advantage of expanded NVIDIA Reflex support in supported titles. Building off of 240fps 1080p streaming from last year, Ultimate members will soon be able to utilize Reflex in supported titles at up to 4K resolution and 60 or 120 fps streaming modes, for low-latency gaming on nearly any device. NVIDIA Reflex support is available in the top PC games on GeForce NOW, including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo IV, Overwatch 2, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Alan Wake 2 and more.
With both Cloud G-SYNC and Reflex, members will feel as if they’re connected directly to GeForce NOW’s RTX 4080 SuperPODs, making their visual experiences smoother, clearer and more immersive than ever.
Mobile Phones Are Now PC Gaming Rigs
Mobile gamers will soon have the option to set streaming resolution to 1440p on Android devices, providing richer graphics on larger screens. Members will be able to turn an Android device into a portable gaming rig with support for quad-high-definition resolution (2,560 x 1,440 pixels), as well as improved keyboard and mouse support.
This offers a glimpse into the future of game streaming, with external displays connected to a mobile device. Using a USB-C docking station, gamers can connect an Android phone to a 1080p or 1440p gaming monitor or TV, with a keyboard and mouse or gamepad.
Paired with a GeForce NOW Ultimate membership, Android phones become portable gaming rigs on which to play the latest triple-A PC games, such as Baldur’s Gate 3, The Finals, and Monster Hunter: World. Now anything, even a phone, can be a high-performance gaming rig.
GeForce NOW improves on-the-go streaming, one device at a time.
The above was on display this week at the CES trade show. The demo streams Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 from GeForce NOW servers in Los Angeles to a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra phone connected to a 1440p monitor in Las Vegas.
Clouds in Japan
The cloud’s drifting into Japan.
NVIDIA will begin operating GeForce NOW in Japan in the spring, operating alongside GeForce NOW Alliance partner KDDI.
Gamers in the region can look forward to Ultimate memberships for the first time, along with all the new games and advancements announced at CES. Visit the page to learn more and sign up for notifications.
With a steady drumbeat of quality games from top publishers, new membership options and the latest NVIDIA technology in the cloud, GeForce NOW is poised to bring another ultimate year of gaming to members.
Generative AI is reshaping trillion-dollar industries, and NVIDIA, a front-runner in smart robotics, is seizing the moment.
Speaking today as part of a special address ahead of CES, NVIDIA Vice President of Robotics and Edge Computing Deepu Talla detailed how NVIDIA and its partners are bringing generative AI and robotics together.
It’s a natural fit, with a growing roster of partners — including Boston Dynamics, Collaborative Robotics, Covariant, Sanctuary AI, Unitree Robotics and others — embracing GPU-accelerated large language models to bring unprecedented levels of intelligence and adaptability to machines of all kinds.
The timing couldn’t be better.
“Autonomous robots powered by artificial intelligence are being increasingly utilized for improving efficiency, decreasing costs and tackling labor shortages,” Talla said.
Present at the Creation
NVIDIA has been central to the generative AI revolution from the beginning.
A decade ago, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang hand-delivered the first NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputer to OpenAI. Now, thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative AI has become one of the fastest-growing technologies of our time. And it’s just getting started.
The impact of generative AI will go beyond text and image generation — and into homes and offices, farms and factories, hospitals and laboratories, Talla predicted.
The key: LLMs, akin to the brain’s language center, will let robots understand and respond to human instructions more naturally.
Such machines will be able to learn continuously from humans, from each other and from the world around them.
“Given these attributes, generative AI is well-suited for robotics,” Talla said.
How Robots Are Using Generative AI
Agility Robotics, NTT, and others are incorporating generative AI into their robots to help them understand text or voice commands. Robot vacuum cleaners from Dreame Technology are being trained in simulated living spaces created by generative AI models. And Electric Sheep is developing a world model for autonomous lawn mowing.
NVIDIA technologies such as the NVIDIA Isaac and Jetson platforms, which facilitate the development and deployment of AI-powered robots, are already relied on by more than 1.2 million developers and 10,000 customers and partners.
Many of them are at CES this week, including Analog Devices, Aurora Labs, Canonical, Dreame Innovation Technology, DriveU, e-con Systems, Ecotron, Enchanted Tools, GlüxKind, Hesai Technology, Leopard Imaging, Segway-Ninebot (Willand (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd.), Nodar, Orbbec, QT Group, Robosense, Spartan Radar, TDK Corporation, Telit, Unitree Robotics, Voyant Photonics and ZVISION Technologies Co., Ltd.
Two Brains Are Better Than One
In his talk at CES, Talla showed the dual-computer model (below) essential for deploying AI in robotics, demonstrating NVIDIA’s comprehensive approach to AI development and application.
The first computer, referred to as an “AI factory,” is central to the creation and continuous improvement of AI models.
AI factories use NVIDIA’s data center compute infrastructure along with its AI and NVIDIA Omniverse platforms for the simulation and training of AI models.
The second computer represents the runtime environment of the robot.
This varies depending on the application: It could be in the cloud or a data center; in an on-premises server for tasks like defect inspection in semiconductor manufacturing; or within an autonomous machine equipped with multiple sensors and cameras.
Generating Quality Assets and Scenes
Talla also highlighted the role of LLMs in breaking down technical barriers, turning typical users into technical artists capable of creating complex robotics workcells or entire warehouse simulations.
With generative AI tools like NVIDIA Picasso, users can generate realistic 3D assets from simple text prompts and add them to digital scenes for dynamic and comprehensive robot training environments.
The same capability extends to creating diverse and physically accurate scenarios in Omniverse, enhancing the testing and training of robots to ensure real-world applicability.
This dovetails with the transformative potential of generative AI in reconfiguring the deployment of robots.
Traditionally, robots are purpose-built for specific tasks, and modifying them for different ones is a time-consuming process.
But advancements in LLMs and vision language models are eliminating this bottleneck, enabling more intuitive interactions with robots through natural language, Talla explained.
Such machines — adaptable and aware of the environment around them — will soon spill out across the world.
To learn more, attend a virtual CES session and watch Talla’s full talk below.
Celebrate the new year with more cloud gaming. Experience the power and performance of the cloud with more than 20 new games to be added to GeForce NOW in January.
Start with five games available this week, including The Finals from Embark Studios.
And tune in to the NVIDIA Special Address at CES on Monday, Jan. 8, at 8 a.m. PT for the latest on gaming, AI-related news and more.
It’s the Final Countdown
Fight for glory, fame and survival.
Fight for fame on the world’s biggest stage with Embark Studios’ The Finals. The free-to-play, multiplayer, first-person shooter is newly supported in the cloud this week, with RTX ON for the most cinematic lighting and visuals for GeForce NOW Ultimate and Priority members.
In The Finals, take part in a deadly TV game show that pits contestants against each other as they battle for a huge reward. Fight alongside teammates in virtual arenas that can be altered, exploited and even destroyed. Manipulate the environment as a weapon itself and use it to take down other players. Drive viewers wild with thrilling combat and flair, using tricks like crashing a wrecking ball into opponents.
Harness the power of the cloud and reach the finals anywhere with the ability to stream across devices. Ultimate members can fight for glory with the advantage of longer gaming sessions, the highest frame rates, ray tracing and ultra-low latency.
In With the New
Flame on! ‘Enshrouded’ launches in the cloud Jan. 24.
In Enshrouded, become Flameborn, the last ember of hope of a dying race. Awaken, survive the terror of a corrupting fog and reclaim the lost beauty of the kingdom. Venture into a vast world, vanquish punishing bosses, build grand halls and forge a path in this co-op survival action role-playing game for up to 16 players, launching in the cloud Jan. 24.
Don’t miss the five newly supported games joining the GeForce NOW library this week:
Dishonored, for Hungary, Czech Republic and Poland (Steam)
An avid cyclist, Thomas Park knows the value of having lots of gears to maintain a smooth, fast ride.
So, when the software architect designed an AI inference platform to serve predictions for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s (OCI) Vision AI service, he picked NVIDIA Triton Inference Server. That’s because it can shift up, down or sideways to handle virtually any AI model, framework and hardware and operating mode — quickly and efficiently.
“The NVIDIA AI inference platform gives our worldwide cloud services customers tremendous flexibility in how they build and run their AI applications,” said Park, a Zurich-based computer engineer and competitive cycler who’s worked for four of the world’s largest cloud services providers.
Specifically, Triton reduced OCI’s total cost of ownership by 10%, increased prediction throughput up to 76% and reduced inference latency up to 51% for OCI Vision and Document Understanding Service models that were migrated to Triton. The services run globally across more than 45 regional data centers, according to an Oracle blog Park and a colleague posted earlier this year.
Computer Vision Accelerates Insights
Customers rely on OCI Vision AI for a wide variety of object detection and image classification jobs. For instance, a U.S.-based transit agency uses it to automatically detect the number of vehicle axles passing by to calculate and bill bridge tolls, sparing busy truckers wait time at toll booths.
OCI AI is also available in Oracle NetSuite, a set of business applications used by more than 37,000 organizations worldwide. It’s used, for example, to automate invoice recognition.
Thanks to Park’s work, Triton is now being adopted across other OCI services, too.
A Triton-Aware Data Service
“We’ve built a Triton-aware AI platform for our customers,” said Tzvi Keisar, a director of product management for OCI’s Data Science service, which handles machine learning for Oracle’s internal and external users.
“If customers want to use Triton, we’ll save them time by automatically doing the configuration work for them in the background, launching a Triton-powered inference endpoint for them,” said Keisar.
His team also plans to make it even easier for its other users to embrace the fast, flexible inference server. Triton is included in NVIDIA AI Enterprise, a platform that provides full security and support businesses need — and it’s available on OCI Marketplace.
A Massive SaaS Platform
OCI’s Data Science service is the machine learning platform for both NetSuite and Oracle Fusion software-as-a-service applications.
“These platforms are massive, with tens of thousands of customers who are also building their work on top of our service,” he said.
It’s a wide swath of mainly enterprise users in manufacturing, retail, transportation and other industries. They’re building and using AI models of nearly every shape and size.
Inference was one of the group’s first services, and Triton came on the team’s radar not long after its launch.
A Best-in-Class Inference Framework
“We saw Triton pick up in popularity as a best-in-class serving framework, so we started experimenting with it,” Keisar said. “We saw really good performance, and it closed a gap in our existing offerings, especially on multi-model inference — it’s the most versatile and advanced inferencing framework out there.”
Launched on OCI in March, Triton has already attracted the attention of many internal teams at Oracle hoping to use it for inference jobs that require serving predictions from multiple AI models running concurrently.
“Triton has a very good track record and performance on multiple models deployed on a single endpoint,” he said.
Accelerating the Future
Looking ahead, Keisar’s team is evaluating NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM software to supercharge inference on the complex large language models (LLMs) that have captured the imagination of many users.
An active blogger, Keisar’s latest article detailed creative quantization techniques for running a Llama 2 LLM with a whopping 70 billion parameters on NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs.
“Even down to four bits, the quality of model outputs is still quite good,” he said. “I can’t explain all the math, but we found a good balance, and I haven’t seen anyone else do this yet.”
Editor’s note: This post is part of our weekly In the NVIDIA Studio series, which celebrates featured artists, offers creative tips and tricks, and demonstrates how NVIDIA Studio technology improves creative workflows. We’re also deep diving on new GeForce RTX 40 Series GPU features, technologies and resources, and how they dramatically accelerate content creation.
A new year means new creative opportunities and new In the NVIDIA Studio beats.
Each week, featured In the NVIDIA Studio artists share their unique artwork and content creation processes, as well as how NVIDIA Studio — a platform comprising fine-tuned hardware and efficient software powered by NVIDIA and GeForce RTX GPUs — elevates their work.
This week’s featured 3D content creator, Pedro Soares, aka Blendeered, created a stunning NVIDIA-themed New Year’s celebration animation.
Plus, tune in to the NVIDIA Special Address at CES on Monday, Jan. 8, at 8 a.m. PT for the latest on content creation, AI-related news and more.
Blendeered’s Beguiling Renders
Blendeered’s latest animation was inspired by NVIDIA and the power of technological innovation.
“The scene, New Year’s, showcases a futuristic city with all the buildings funneling to the center point,” said Blendeered. “This evokes the feeling of accelerating toward a brighter future, which is what NVIDIA is all about: taking tech to the next level, every day.”
Happy New Year from NVIDIA Studio!
May your next year be filled with many beautiful renders.
The Portugal-based creator first conceptualized the scene.
“The futuristic city needed to give a sense of speed,” he said. He accomplished this using highlighted arrows, neon-green street lines and light beams on digital screens across various high-rise buildings.
Blendeered then built individual assets in Blender version 3.6 — by far his favorite 3D app, in case his stage name didn’t give it away.
“Blender captivates users with its friendly interface, speed, power, real-time rendering and vibrant community — and the best part is that it’s free!” he shared.
Next, the artist began lighting the scene using the new Panorama feature in the NVIDIA Canvas app. He tapped OptiX denoising to preview final render results in real time, speeding his workflow.
Available for GeForce RTX GPU owners and free to download, NVIDIA Canvas uses AI to turn brushstrokes into realistic landscape images for quick creation of backgrounds and concept exploration.
NVIDIA Canvas can be used to generate full, spherical HDRi backdrops and brainstorm ideas.
Blendeered generated a full, spherical, high-dynamic-range imaging (HDRi) backdrop for his computer-generated imagery workflows — based on AI rendering — with a few simple sketches. He then exported it as an HDR file and imported it into Blender. YouTuber Timo Helmers demonstrates this type of workflow in the video tutorial below.
“NVIDIA Canvas is amazing software that allowed me to make an HDRi backdrop that fit my scene perfectly,” said Blendeered.
From there, he completed the animation process before exporting the files to Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve version 18.
Completing animation work in Blender.
DaVinci Resolve is a key app for GPU acceleration and AI-powered workflows. All of the AI effects in DaVinci Resolve version 18.6 run twice as fast on NVIDIA RTX GPUs with acceleration using the NVIDIA TensorRT software development kit.
Blendeered’s post-production work included GPU-accelerated color grading, video editing and color scopes. And NVENC, a GPU hardware accelerator engine for video decoding, enabled faster, smoother playback and scrubbing of high-resolution video files.
Post-production work in DaVinci Resolve.
For the final export, the eighth generation NVENC worked together with the built-in dual encoders on the artist’s GeForce RTX 4090 GPU to generate video files twice as fast. For Blendeered, NVIDIA GPUs are the clear choice for content creation because they provide “power, efficiency and reliability.”
When asked to give advice for aspiring artists, Blendeered encouraged beginners to “embrace consistent practice, learn from failures, seek feedback and stay true to the inner artistic voice.”
Whether abundant, endangered or extinct, animal species are the focus of countless AI-powered conservation projects.
These initiatives — accelerated using NVIDIA GPUs, deep learning software and robotics technology — are alerting conservationists to poaching threats, powering more sustainable aquaculture and helping scientists monitor coral reef health.
Take a safari through the NVIDIA Blog’s top animal stories of 2023 below.
As a bonus, discover how animals — whether beautiful butterflies, flashy fish or massive mammoths — are inspiring a herd of digital artists.
Conservation AI, a U.K.-based nonprofit, is preserving biodiversity with an edge AI platform that analyzes camera footage in real time to identify species of interest, rapidly alerting conservationists to threats such as wildfires or poachers.
Founded by researchers at Liverpool John Moores University, the nonprofit now has dozens of cameras deployed across the globe running an AI platform built using NVIDIA Jetson modules, the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit and NVIDIA Triton Inference Server.
The AI software is being deployed in Uganda and South Africa to keep an eye on pangolins and rhinos at risk of being hunted by poachers.
Video courtesy of Chester Zoo, a U.K.-based conservation society.
Colossal Biosciences is tackling endangered species conservation and de-extinction using computational biology.
Using gene editing technology, AI models and the NVIDIA Parabricks software suite for genomic analysis, scientists at Colossal are working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger — and protect dwindling species such as the African forest elephant.
After combining incomplete DNA sequences from extinct species’ bone samples with genomic data from closely related creatures, the team uses Parabricks for sequence alignment and variant calling — enabling them to complete analysis 12x faster.
GoSmart, a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups and the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI partner ecosystem, is deploying AI for more efficient and sustainable fish farming.
The company’s compact edge AI system, powered by the NVIDIA Jetson platform, analyzes a pond or tank’s temperature and oxygen levels, as well as the average weight and population distribution of fish — information farmers can use for decisions around fish feeding and harvesting.
The team is also adding AI models that analyze fish behavior and indicators of disease and plans to integrate its solution with autonomous feeding systems.
Researchers at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa are analyzing satellite imagery using NVIDIA GPU-powered AI to track halos — the rings of sand that surround coral reefs — as a way to assess ecosystem health.
The presence of halos indicates that a coral reef has a healthy population of marine life, including fish and invertebrates. A change in their shape suggests a degrading environment that needs attention from conservationists.
The researchers’ AI tool, which runs on an NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU, can analyze hundreds of coral reef halos in around two minutes, a task that would take 10 hours for a human to complete.
An autonomous underwater robot powered by the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX module is roaming reef ecosystems to help scientists understand human impact on reefs and surrounding sea creatures.
Developed by researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Autonomous Robotics and Perception Laboratory, the CUREE robot collects environmental data that informs 3D models of reefs.
The team developed an AI model called DeepSeeColor that cleans up blurry underwater footage to enable more accurate fish detection by another neural network. They’re also working on detection models to identify audio samples from different creatures.
Fantastic Fauna: Animals Inspire AI-Powered Digital Art
Greek philosopher Plato said that art imitates life — and digital art is no exception, as exemplified by artists who this year used NVIDIA technology to develop stunning animal-inspired visuals.
Taiwanese artist Steven Tung took a more whimsical approach in The Given Fish, an animation depicting stone fish created using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Substance 3D Painter and Blender — all accelerated by an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU-powered system.
Before ringing in the new year, GeForce NOW is taking a look back at a 2023 full of top-notch gaming. Explore GeForce NOW’s year in review, which brought more hit games, improved service features and the launch of the Ultimate membership tier.
Plus, GFN Thursday is raising a toast to the GeForce NOW community by delivering more than 40 new games to stream from the cloud.
Wrapping It Up
It’s been an amazing year of cloud gaming. The launch of the Ultimate tier brought high-performance cloud gaming across North America and Europe, streaming from newly rolled out GeForce RTX 4080 SuperPODs.
For the first time in the cloud, members could stream up to 240 frames per second, or 4K 120 fps on the native PC and Mac apps, and experience support for ultrawide resolutions for the smoothest and most immersive gameplay — all thanks to the powerful NVIDIA Ada Lovelace GPU architecture.
To prove the power of the cloud, NVIDIA gave gamers the ultimate test of latency on KovaaK’s, a latency-sensitive, first-person-shooter aim trainer.
Gamers competed for top scores on the leaderboard, and the results were staggering — showing a 1.8x improvement in aiming just by playing with an Ultimate membership.
NVIDIA also posed a challenge to Cyberpunk 2077 fans: to play the graphics-intensive game on an unknown system. Players were astonished to discover that they were playing with full ray tracing on a Chromebook with GeForce NOW. NVIDIA even brought the experience to The Game Awards, showing off the power of gaming on a Chromebook with GeForce NOW on a global stage.
With higher-performance streaming came more collaborations with top-quality publishers.
A new window to the cloud.
NVIDIA and Microsoft signed a 10-year partnership this year, bringing hit Xbox PC games and over 100 supported PC Game Pass titles to the cloud, with more to come. Members could stream some of the biggest Xbox PC titles, including the Wolfenstein and Forza Horizon franchises, Starfield, and the Ori and Age of Empires series, across devices at high performance for the first time.
The cloud is calling.
With the Microsoft partnership came the first Activision game in the cloud, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III. With NVIDIA DLSS 3 and Reflex technologies, Ultimate members can get the highest frame rates and lowest latencies for the smoothest gameplay.
Catch the most impressive ray-traced lighting in the cloud.
The year closed out with a celebration spotlighting 500 NVIDIA RTX-supported games and applications. Over 90 titles with RTX ON are featured on GeForce NOW, easily found on the app’s dedicated RTX ON row, including top games Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake II, Far Cry 6, Control and more.
Pretty impressive.
The GeForce NOW community put up some impressive numbers, streaming over 250 million hours in the cloud.
And it doesn’t stop there — check back in each week to see what’s in store for GeForce NOW throughout the new year.
In With the New
To celebrate the amazing GeForce NOW community, the cloud gaming service is adding more than 40 Xbox and PC Game Pass titles this week — sure to tide members into the new year.
The best way to experience these games and the over 100 PC Game Pass titles in the cloud is with the latest GeForce NOW membership bundle, which includes a free, three-month PC Game Pass subscription with the purchase of a six-month GeForce NOW Ultimate membership.
Catch the full list of 46 games:
AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES – nirvanA Initiative (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
Amazing Cultivation Simulator (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
The Anacrusis (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
Age of Wonders 4 (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
Before We Leave (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
Century: Age of Ashes (Xbox, available on the Microsoft Store)
2023 was marked by the generative AI boom, representing a new era for how artificial intelligence can be used across industries.
The year’s top videos from the NVIDIA YouTube channel reflect this focus, with popular videos highlighting the technology powering large language models, new platforms for building generative AI applications and how accelerated computing and AI can advance climate science.
And don’t miss replays of NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s event appearances — his GTC keynote in March has garnered 22 million views, making it by far the most-viewed video on the channel.
Tune in to NVIDIA’s top five videos of the year:
Predicting Extreme Weather Risk — Weeks in Advance
Explore in colorful detail how running FourCastNet — an AI framework developed by researchers at NVIDIA, Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley Lab — on NVIDIA GPUs enables quicker, more accurate extreme weather predictions.
Seeing is achieving with this stunning demo of the NVIDIA Earth-2 platform, which offers high-resolution climate visualizations for scientists, as well as breathtakingly detailed urban airflow information for architects and city planners.
A Tour of the NVIDIA DGX H100
Presenting the engine behind the large language model breakthrough — the NVIDIA DGX H100. Hear from Huang on why DGX is “the essential instrument of AI.”
Fine-Tuning Generative AI With NVIDIA AI Workbench
Check out this demo — featuring a multitude of Toy Jensens — to learn how NVIDIA AI Workbench streamlines selecting foundation models, building project environments and fine-tuning models with domain-specific data.
NVIDIA GeForce NOW (@NVIDIAGFN) 
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