NVIDIA today unveiled ChatRTX, the AI assistant that runs locally on your machine, and which is accelerated by your GeForce RTX GPU. NVIDIA had originally launched this as "Chat with RTX" back in February 2024, back then this was regarded more as a public tech demo. We reviewed the application in our feature article. The ChatRTX rebranding is probably aimed at making the name sound more like ChatGPT, which is what the application aims to be—except it runs completely on your machine, and is exhaustively customizable. The most obvious advantage of a locally-run AI assistant is privacy—you are interacting with an assistant that processes your prompt locally, and accelerated by your GPU; the second is that you're not held back by performance bottlenecks by cloud-based assistants.

ChatRTX is a major update over the Chat with RTX tech-demo from February. To begin with, the application has several stability refinements from Chat with RTX, which felt a little rough on the edges. NVIDIA has significantly updated the LLMs included with the application, including Mistral 7B INT4, and Llama 2 7B INT4. Support is also added for additional LLMs, including Gemma, a local LLM trained by Google, based on the same technology used to make Google's flagship Gemini model. ChatRTX now also supports ChatGLM3, for both English and Chinese prompts. Perhaps the biggest upgrade ChatRTX is its ability to recognize images on your machine, as it incorporates CLIP (contrastive language-image pre-training) from OpenAI. CLIP is an LLM that recognizes what it's seeing in image collections. Using this feature, you can interact with your image library without the need for metadata. ChatRTX doesn't just take text input—you can speak to it. It now accepts natural voice input, as it integrates the Whisper speech-to-text NLI model.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA ChatRTX

Leading global motherboard manufacturer, ASRock, has successively released software based on Microsoft Windows 10/11 and Canonical Ubuntu Linux platforms since the end of last year, which can help users quickly download, install and configure artificial intelligence software. After receiving great response from the market, ASRock has revealed the 2024 Q1 update of AI QuickSet today, adding two new artificial intelligence (AI) tools, Whisper Desktop and AudioCraft, allowing users of ASRock AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards to experience more diverse artificial intelligence (AI) applications!

ASRock AI QuickSet software tool 1.2.4 Windows version supports Microsoft Windows 10/11 64-bit operating system, while Linux version 1.1.6 supports Canonical Ubuntu 22.04.4 Desktop (64-bit) operating system, through ASRock AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards and AMD ROCm software platform provide powerful computing capabilities to support a variety of well-known artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The 1.2.4 Windows version supports image generation tools such as DirectML Shark and Stable Diffusion web UI, as well as the newly added Whisper Desktop speech recognition tool; and the 1.1.6 Linux version supports Image/Manga Translator, Stable Diffusion CLI & web UI image generation tool, and Text generation web UI Llama 2 text generation tool using Meta Llama 2 language model, Ultralytics YOLOv8 object recognition tool, and the newly added AudioCraft audio generation tool.

It's official: NVIDIA delivered the world's fastest platform in industry-standard tests for inference on generative AI. In the latest MLPerf benchmarks, NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM—software that speeds and simplifies the complex job of inference on large language models—boosted the performance of NVIDIA Hopper architecture GPUs on the GPT-J LLM nearly 3x over their results just six months ago. The dramatic speedup demonstrates the power of NVIDIA's full-stack platform of chips, systems and software to handle the demanding requirements of running generative AI. Leading companies are using TensorRT-LLM to optimize their models. And NVIDIA NIM—a set of inference microservices that includes inferencing engines like TensorRT-LLM—makes it easier than ever for businesses to deploy NVIDIA's inference platform.

Raising the Bar in Generative AI
TensorRT-LLM running on NVIDIA H200 Tensor Core GPUs—the latest, memory-enhanced Hopper GPUs—delivered the fastest performance running inference in MLPerf's biggest test of generative AI to date. The new benchmark uses the largest version of Llama 2, a state-of-the-art large language model packing 70 billion parameters. The model is more than 10x larger than the GPT-J LLM first used in the September benchmarks. The memory-enhanced H200 GPUs, in their MLPerf debut, used TensorRT-LLM to produce up to 31,000 tokens/second, a record on MLPerf's Llama 2 benchmark. The H200 GPU results include up to 14% gains from a custom thermal solution. It's one example of innovations beyond standard air cooling that systems builders are applying to their NVIDIA MGX designs to take the performance of Hopper GPUs to new heights.

Intel's "AI Everywhere" hype campaign has generated the most noise in mainstream and enterprise segments. Team Blue's Gaudi—a family of deep learning accelerators—does not hit the headlines all that often. Their current generation model, Gaudi 2, is overshadowed by Team Green and Red alternatives—according to Intel's official marketing spiel: "it performs competitively on deep learning training and inference, with up to 2.4x faster performance than NVIDIA A100." Habana, an Intel subsidiary, has been working on optimizing Large Language Model (LLM) inference on Gaudi 1 and 2 for a while—their co-operation with Hugging Face has produced impressive results, as of late February. Siddhant Jagtap, an Intel Data Scientist, has demonstrated: "how easy it is to generate text with the Llama 2 family of models (7b, 13b and 70b) using Optimum Habana and a custom pipeline class."

Jagtap reckons that folks will be able to: "run the models with just a few lines of code" on Gaudi 2 accelerators—additionally, Intel's hardware is capable of accepting single and multiple prompts. The custom pipeline class: "has been designed to offer great flexibility and ease of use. Moreover, it provides a high level of abstraction and performs end-to-end text-generation which involves pre-processing and post-processing." His article/blog outlines various prerequisites and methods of getting Llama 2 text generation up and running on Gaudi 2. Jagtap concluded that Habana/Intel has: "presented a custom text-generation pipeline on Intel Gaudi 2 AI accelerator that accepts single or multiple prompts as input. This pipeline offers great flexibility in terms of model size as well as parameters affecting text-generation quality. Furthermore, it is also very easy to use and to plug into your scripts, and is compatible with LangChain." Hugging Face reckons that Gaudi 2 delivers roughly twice the throughput speed of NVIDIA A100 80 GB in both training and inference scenarios. Intel has teased third generation Gaudi accelerators—industry watchdogs believe that next-gen solutions are designed to compete with Team Green H100 AI GPUs.

Intel just announced optimizations for PyTorch (IPEX) to take advantage of the AI acceleration features of its Arc "Alchemist" GPUs.PyTorch is a popular machine learning library that is often associated with NVIDIA GPUs, but it is actually platform-agnostic. It can be run on a variety of hardware, including CPUs and GPUs. However, performance may not be optimal without specific optimizations. Intel offers such optimizations through the Intel Extension for PyTorch (IPEX), which extends PyTorch with optimizations specifically designed for Intel's compute hardware.

Intel released a blog post detailing how to run Meta AI's Llama 2 large language model on its Arc "Alchemist" A770 graphics card. The model requires 14 GB of GPU RAM, so a 16 GB version of the A770 is recommended. This development could be seen as a direct response to NVIDIA's Chat with RTX tool, which allows GeForce users with >8 GB RTX 30-series "Ampere" and RTX 40-series "Ada" GPUs to run PyTorch-LLM models on their graphics cards. NVIDIA achieves lower VRAM usage by distributing INT4-quantized versions of the models, while Intel uses a higher-precision FP16 version. In theory, this should not have a significant impact on the results. This blog post by Intel provides instructions on how to set up Llama 2 inference with PyTorch (IPEX) on the A770.