Nvidia Corp. today announced a major upgrade to its Nvidia AI and Nvidia AI Enterprise platforms, with new features designed to advance workloads such as speech, recommendation systems, hyperscale inference and more.

The upgrades were announced at Nvidia GTC 2022 alongside the launch of Nvidia’s new AI Accelerated program, which is aimed at guaranteeing the performance and reliability of artificial intelligence applications built using the platform.

The Nvidia AI platform is a suite of tools including software development kits and AI frameworks that developers can use to design, deploy, manage and scale AI across multiple nodes in order to power complex training, inference and machine learning workloads.

One of its key components is Nvidia Triton, an open-source hyperscale model inference solution that now includes a Model Navigator to help accelerate the deployment of optimized AI models, a Management Service for efficient scaling in Kubernetes and a Forest Inference Library to enable inference on tree-based models.

Another key component, Nvidia Riva 2.0, has been updated. Riva is a speech AI SDK that includes various pre-trained models with high recognition rates that enable twice the accuracy over generic speech recognition services, Nvidia said. The latest version offers speech recognition in seven languages, deep learning-based text-to-speech for both male and female voices, plus custom tuning with Nvidia TAO Toolkit.

The platform also comes with the latest version of Nvidia NeMo Megatron 0.9, which is a framework for training large language models, and Nvidia Merlin 1.0, a brand new component that Nvidia describes as an “end-to-end recommender framework” for building high-performance recommendation systems. Finally, Nvidia AI now comes with Nvidia Maxine, an audio and video quality enhancement software development kit that enables real-time communication with AI.

Nvidia said a number of high-profile customers are using Nvidia AI, which is available starting today. They include Snap Inc., the creator of the Snapchat messaging platform.

“On Snapchat, our community plays with Lenses over 6 billion times per day,” said Alan Bekker, head of Conversational AI at Snap. “Snap is using Nvidia Riva to optimize our AI-based speech capabilities and offer them to Lens Studio creators to build a new generation of compelling AR experiences.”

As for Nvidia AI Enterprise, the enterprise-grade version of the Nvidia AI platform, it now comes optimized, certified and supported on every major data center and cloud infrastructure platform, the company said. The latest version, Nvidia Enterprise 2.0, is now supported on Red Hat OpenShift and and VMware vSphere with Tanzu.

Additionally, Nvidia AI Enterprise 2.0 gains support for more AI software containers for enhanced training and inference. For instance, support for the Nvidia TAO Toolkit means developers will be able to fine-tune pre-trained AI models and customize them more easily, even if they lack expertise in AI or training data.

Nvidia said the latest version of Nvidia AI Enterprise has already been used to good effect by NTT Communications, a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., to accelerate its research and development of natural language processing and intelligent video analytics applications.

“Many of our application developers now use accelerated computing, and are in need of an internal infrastructure that provides an easy-to-use, cost-effective GPU-enabled environment,” said Shoichiro Henmi, director of Technology Division, Innovation Center, at NTT Communications. “We are confident that Nvidia AI Enterprise will provide an ideal solution as an AI-enabled platform to support large-scale development in our VMware vSphere, Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.”

Image: Nvidia