Nvidia is the market leader for graphics cards, but increasingly it has become more and more focused on things outside of the gaming and graphics processing space – in particular on AI, as of late. So what does a company that is known for its GPUs (graphics processing units) do when it’s trying to spread the word about its AI capabilities? It gives an AI out as a perk for its graphics card owners named “Chat With RTX”.
If you’re unfamiliar with Nvidia, it’s one of the companies that underlies the current AI boom. Developing graphics cards and platforms for AI data centres, Nvidia has been hard at work in the space – to the point where its U.S. stock price outpaced Amazon’s this week due to its generative AI developments.
Now, owners of Nvidia’s RTX 3000 or RTX 4000 series GPUs will get a little taste of the AI boom with Chat With RTX. Provided your graphics card has 8GB of VRAM, you’ll be able to download the new AI for free (if you don’t meet this requirement, you’ll be unable to use the app).
But what does the AI… Do? Well, instead of relying on data pulled from a cloud-based large language model, Chat With RTX relies on your local files. AI models Mistral and Llama can be chosen from to produce results, and the AI can pull text from .txt, .doc, .docx, and .xml files.
As demonstrated in the below video, it can also generate answers from input YouTube videos.
Nvidia claims that private data stays on your local PC and is not shared online.
How would you use this bot? Well, if you’re looking for an extremely specific answer to a question, that’s buried somewhere in your downloaded .docx files but you can’t find it, it seems like an ideal tool. Whether or not you’re actually downloading your notes is another story (you might just be using the online Google Drive suite, like me) but from the demo, Nvidia’s AI seems quite capable.
But it is in a demo phase, and whether or not you find a proper use for it is another story. Asking the bot ‘When does my new job start?’, for example, seems like quite a pointless, but innocuous question, and I wouldn’t want to rely on an AI for this kind of answer.
You also need to designate a file path for the bot to scan. Setting it to search your entire computer is likely to yield long load times, especially if you’re like me and have one slow hard disc drive still connected, so at the very least, it might encourage you to have all your docs in one place.
Eligible Nvidia users can download the bot from the Nvidia website.
Image: Nvidia