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Nvidia logo: Bet on a future shaped by AI

Photo: Dado Ruvic / REUTERS

The boom in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to ensure explosive growth at the chip company Nvidia.

In the last quarter, sales of $22.1 billion were more than three times higher than a year earlier.

Analysts on average had expected $20.4 billion.

The share rose by a good nine percent in after-hours US trading, the DAX rose by 1.3 percent to over 17,300 points at the start of trading, thus exceeding its most recent record that it set at the end of last week.

In Japan, the leading index Nikkei 225 rose to its highest level in around 35 years after the Nvidia figures were announced.

The business with technology for data centers brought the company sales of $18.4 billion, five times as much as in the same quarter of the previous year.

The Nvidia technologies, originally developed for graphics cards, have long been proven in computing work to train applications with AI.

This is causing Nvidia’s business – and its stock market value – to rise rapidly.

Nvidia shares: up 40 percent since the beginning of the year

The numbers were eagerly awaited.

Nvidia shares have increased by around 40 percent since the beginning of the year alone - and observers assumed that the slightest indication of a slowdown in growth could have led to a price collapse.

However, Nvidia did not disappoint.

The outlook for the current quarter was also above expectations.

Nvidia promised revenue of around $24 billion; the market had expected an average forecast of around $22 billion.

Nvidia's quarterly profit jumped from $1.4 to almost $12.3 billion within a year.

The use of AI has reached a turning point and demand is increasing worldwide, said Nvidia boss Jensen Huang.

The head of ChatGPT developer OpenAI assumes that in the future there will be more content created by AI than by humans.

But society must also prepare for the negative consequences of the AI ​​boom, said Sam Altman on Wednesday at an event organized by chip manufacturer Intel.

Influence on elections or weapons?

There could be potentially negative effects on elections in the foreseeable future.

Risks such as cybersecurity and bioweapons are also being taken more seriously.

AI will “not just be a good story,” said Altman in an interview with Intel boss Pat Gelsinger.

But the bottom line is that it will be a positive development, he said.

AI will accelerate scientific research, cure diseases and improve education, Altman said.

"I think it's difficult to imagine today how much better the future will be." But even more than with other technologies, governments need a regulatory role - now, while the AI ​​models are still relatively weak.

It shouldn't happen that, for example, OpenAI secretly develops an AI in the basement that is smarter than humans and suddenly unleashes it on the world.

Society and its institutions must be given time to gradually adapt to developments.

ChatGPT fueled the AI ​​hype about a year ago.

Such AI chatbots are trained with enormous amounts of information and can formulate texts at the linguistic level of a human, write software code and summarize information.

The principle behind this is that they estimate, word by word, how a sentence should continue.

Disadvantage: The software sometimes gives completely wrong answers, even if it was only based on correct information.

However, Nvidia's business is being slowed somewhat by measures taken by the US government against deliveries of AI technology to China.

Nvidia is not allowed to sell its most modern chip systems there.

Washington points out the risk that the technology could be used for military purposes.

Nvidia has not yet received an export license for a slimmed-down version of the devices, which is why chips have recently been delivered whose performance is below the specified limits.

apr/dpa