Startups

Nvidia launches new cloud services and partnerships to train generative AI

Comment

Image Credits: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

At its annual GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia announced a set of cloud services designed to help businesses build and run generative AI models trained on custom data and created for “domain-specific tasks,” like writing ad copy.

Under the brand Nvidia AI Foundations, each individual cloud service — Nvidia NeMo for language models and Nvidia Picasso for image, video and 3D content generation — includes pretrained models, frameworks for data processing, APIs and support from Nvidia engineering staff. Once models are ready for deployment, enterprises can run run them in Nvidia’s cloud or elsewhere.

As of today, the NeMo generative AI cloud service is in early access. The Picasso service is in private preview. Signing up for either requires submitting an application.

“Generative AI is driving the fast adoption of AI and reinventing countless industries,” Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said in a press release. “Nvidia AI Foundations let enterprises customize foundation models with their own data to generate humanity’s most valuable resources — intelligence and creativity.”

With the NeMo cloud service, Nvidia says that developers can add domain-specific knowledge and functional skills to text-generating models for use cases like chatbots, enterprise search and customer service. Models available on the service will be regularly updated with additional training data, the company says, and benefit from information retrieval capabilities that augment them with real-time data.

As for Nvidia Picasso, it’s a cloud service for building text-to-image, text-to-video and text-to-3D object models. (While text-to-video and text-to-3D object models are less common now than their text-to-image brethren, vendors are increasingly beginning to experiment with them — anticipating a surge in interest.)  Customers can use Picasso to train and deploy models on their data, either using pretrained models from Nvidia or optimizing and running their own models.

In a big customer win, Nvidia says that it’s working with Adobe to co-develop “the next generation of commercially viable generative AI models” on the Picasso platform. They’ll be brought to market through Photoshop, Premiere Pro and After Effects, according to Nvidia, filling out Adobe’s recently-debuted Firefly family of generative AI products.

No doubt eager to avoiding wading into the copyright controversy around generative AI, Nvidia says that it’s collaborating with another party, Getty Images, to train “responsible” generative text-to-image and text-to-video models. The models will be developed using content from Getty Images’ library, Nvidia says, with Getty Images will providing royalties to artists on any revenues generated from the models.

That’s significant given that Getty Images is currently embroiled in a lawsuit against Stability AI, maker of another generative AI service called Stable Diffusion, over using its images to train its AI without permission from Getty or rightsholders. Nvidia, it seems, didn’t want to take its chances — or perhaps wanted to hedge its bets, particularly as similar lawsuits work their way through the courts.

In a related announcement, Nvidia says it plans to partner with Shutterstock, a Getty Images competitor, specifically to train a generative text-to-3D object model using Picasso. Shutterstock’s assets and metadata will be used for training, and Shutterstock will compensate artists via its recently launched Contributor Fund, Nvidia says.

Shutterstock plans to offer the model on its own platform once it’s ready for deployment, complementing the text-to-image tool it already provides through a partnership and licensing agreement with OpenAI.

More TechCrunch

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Over the past eight years,…

Fisker collapsed under the weight of its founder’s promises

What is AI? We’ve put together this non-technical guide to give anyone a fighting chance to understand how and why today’s AI works.

WTF is AI?

President Joe Biden has vetoed H.J.Res. 109, a congressional resolution that would have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current approach to banks and crypto. Specifically, the resolution targeted the…

President Biden vetoes crypto custody bill

Featured Article

Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment.

3 hours ago
Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get into…

VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion…

Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items

Tumblr officially shut down “Tips,” an opt-in feature where creators could receive one-time payments from their followers.  As of today, the tipping icon has automatically disappeared from all posts and…

You can no longer use Tumblr’s tipping feature 

Generative AI improvements are increasingly being made through data curation and collection — not architectural — improvements. Big Tech has an advantage.

AI training data has a price tag that only Big Tech can afford

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: Can we (and could we ever) trust OpenAI?

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Featured Article

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

23 hours ago
Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

23 hours ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

1 day ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation