The ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming: Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder and CEO

NVIDIA today announced NVIDIA Cosmos, a platform comprising state-of-the-art generative world foundation models, advanced tokenizers, guardrails and an accelerated video processing pipeline built to advance the development of physical AI systems such as autonomous vehicles (AVs) and robots.

Physical AI models are costly to develop, and require vast amounts of real-world data and testing. Cosmos world foundation models, or WFMs, offer developers an easy way to generate massive amounts of photoreal, physics-based synthetic data to train and evaluate their existing models. Developers can also build custom models by fine-tuning Cosmos WFMs.

Cosmos models will be available under an open model license to accelerate the work of the robotics and AV community. Developers can preview the first models on the NVIDIA API catalog, or download the family of models and fine-tuning framework from the NVIDIA NGC catalog or Hugging Face.

Leading robotics and automotive companies, including 1X, Agile Robots, Agility, Figure AI, Foretellix, Fourier, Galbot, Hillbot, IntBot, Neura Robotics, Skild AI, Virtual Incision, Waabi and XPENG, along with ridesharing giant Uber, are among the first to adopt Cosmos.

“The ChatGPT moment for robotics is coming. Like large language models, world foundation models are fundamental to advancing robot and AV development, yet not all developers have the expertise and resources to train their own,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “We created Cosmos to democratize physical AI and put general robotics in reach of every developer.”

Open World Foundation Models to Accelerate the Next Wave of AI

NVIDIA Cosmos’ suite of open models means developers can customize the WFMs with datasets, such as video recordings of AV trips or robots navigating a warehouse, according to the needs of their target application.

Cosmos WFMs are purpose-built for physical AI research and development, and can generate physics-based videos from a combination of inputs, like text, image and video, as well as robot sensor or motion data. The models are built for physically based interactions, object permanence, and high-quality generation of simulated industrial environments — like warehouses or factories — and of driving environments, including various road conditions.

In his opening keynote at CES, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang showcased ways physical AI developers can use Cosmos models, including for:

Video search and understanding, enabling developers to easily find specific training scenarios, like snowy road conditions or warehouse congestion, from video data.

Physics-based photoreal synthetic data generation, using Cosmos models to generate photoreal videos from controlled 3D scenarios developed in the NVIDIA Omniverse platform.

Physical AI model development and evaluation, whether building a custom model on the foundation models, improving the models using Cosmos for reinforcement learning or testing how they perform given a specific simulated scenario.

Foresight and “multiverse” simulation, using Cosmos and Omniverse to generate every possible future outcome an AI model could take to help it select the best and most accurate path.