Nvidia's Huang: All software will be agentic

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the SaaS vs. agentic AI storyline doesn't make a lot of sense. Why? All software will become agentic.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference, Huang made headlines by saying Nvidia's investment in OpenAI will likely be its last. However, there were more big picture themes from Huang to ponder.

Huang’s appearance at the Morgan Stanley conference served as a warmup act for a news barrage at Nvidia GTC March 16-19.

The big theme was a reiteration that software is only going to become more important. That said, software companies will leverage models and become more agentic. He said:

"There will be no software in the future that's not agentic. How could you have software that's dumb? And so, it is absolutely true that every software company will become an agentic company. They're going to simultaneously use open models that they download themselves and fine tune. They're also going to use closed models."

Huang added that some models will be owned and some rented just like companies split the work between employees and contractors.

Today, software companies will be much larger because they will rent out agents to do work. "The business profile will change because today these companies are basically software licensing. In the future, they'll rent specialized tokens," said Huang.

• Microsoft CEO Nadella: AI efficiency drive on deck
• Box CEO Levie: AI agents need context, unstructured data
• Anthropic vs. SaaS: A nuanced view
• SaaS under the microscope: How to evaluate your vendor
• Zoho just delivered the best SaaS defense vs. AI

Other tidbits from Huang's talk include:

• "We're going to invest $30 billion in OpenAI. I think the opportunity to invest $100 billion in OpenAI is probably not in the cards. And the reason for that is because they're going to go public. And so, I'm fairly sure that if we provide the capacity they need, which the compute capacity they need, which we're ramping up hard to go to, the revenues will more than follow. And they're going to go public towards the end of the year. And so this might be the last time we'll have the opportunity to invest in a consequential company like this. And our $10 billion investment in Anthropic probably will be the last as well."
• "We expanded OpenAI's capacity from Azure to OCI to now AWS. We expanded OpenAI's reach of capacity to AWS. We're ramping AWS like mad. We're ramping them as hard as we can so that OpenAI has accessed even more capacity. And in the case of Anthropic, we're expanding their capacity as aggressively as we can at AWS as well as Azure. And so notice what we're doing in both -- they used to be one and one, now they're kind of cross product."
• "When you own the entire stack and you own all the chips inside, you could change it every single year. If you don't own the entire stack and you don't own all the chips, it's hard to innovate every year. And the reason for that is because you're connecting too many cats and dogs, and there's too much innovation to pull together once a year if you can't control it because it's a full stack problem."

More:

• Nvidia Q4 shines, sees strong hyperscaler, enterprise demand
• Constellation ShortList™ AI Factory Providers
• Constellation ShortList™ AI Application Development Platforms
• Meta to double down on Nvidia's AI stack, including CPUs
• Nvidia touts Rubin platform production, hardware advances
• A look at how Mercedes Benz, Nvidia collaborated on autonomous vehicles
• Nvidia highlights its robotics momentum as Qualcomm makes its platform case