NVIDIA and Adobe CEOs discuss partnership

Source: Bircan Tulga Photography, via NVIDIA blog post.
Narayen (left) with Huang (right).

Adobe President and CEO Shantanu Narayen and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang spoke about how new tools — such as Adobe’s new Sensei AI and machine learning framework — will enhance the work of creative and marketing professionals at the Adobe Summit in the US in March 2018.

The exchange was reported in an NVIDIA blog post. “You guys are going to create experiences with these tools… that will allow people to create an enormous number of new realities,” Huang told the audience.

“In the case of virtual reality (VR) it’s a wormhole for us to travel to virtual worlds; VR is simply a path that allows us to teleport, to wormhole, into another world. Augmented reality (AR) is a way for artificial agents to wormhole into us, so they’ll be sitting right there in front of us, in augmented reality.”

Taking the audience to The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, Adobe’s AI was able to describe the aesthetics of a scene and instantly tag thousands of people, objects and animals as a camera panned around the village of Novigrad. Asked to “show me the angry man with arms crossed,” it was able to call up an image from the experience.

“Obviously, you can do this for video games, but you can do this for real things …” Huang said.

“Retail experiences, travel experiences …,” Narayen added. “This was done by virtue of the fact that you have this open architecture that allows us — and we’re doing the same for our customers — to make this available so that our customers can apply their own data science.”

NVIDIA has met the challenge of modelling the physics of how light moves around a scene to deliver realism in real time with NVIDIA RTX ray-tracing technology, which will allow content creators to use this technique in real time. “It’s just a huge breakthrough,” Huang told Narayen.

Simulating physics — key to creating life-like graphics — also led to NVIDIA’s AI and machine learning, Huang said.

Adobe and NVIDIA announced at the same time a partnership to enhance their artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technologies. Building on years of collaboration, the companies will work to optimise the Adobe Sensei AI and machine learning (ML) framework for NVIDIA GPUs.

Adobe and NVIDIA will work on enabling GPU acceleration for a broad set of Adobe's creative and digital experience products. This includes Sensei-powered features, such as auto lip sync in Adobe Character Animator Creative Cloud (CC) and face aware editing in Photoshop CC, as well as cloud-based AI/ML products and features, such as image analysis for Adobe Stock and Lightroom CC and auto-tagging in Adobe Experience Manager.

The companies also plan to work on optimising Sensei AI services for NVIDIA hardware in the cloud and at the edge, for improved performance and new capabilities. In addition, they plan to explore packaging and delivering easy-to-use Sensei AI services to NVIDIA's ecosystem of developers. This includes services targeted at creative mediums, such as mixed reality, next-generation rendering like NVIDIA’s new RTX real-time ray-tracing technology, and other new immersive experiences.

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