Nvidia’s GTC conference had it all: trillion dollar sales forecasts, graphics technology that can yassify video gamesgrand proclamations that every company needs an OpenClaw strategy, and even a robot version of the beloved snowman Olaf from Disney’s “Frozen.”
On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I recap CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote and discuss what it means for Nvidia’s future. And yes, a large part of our discussion focused on poor Olaf, whose microphone had to be turned off when he started going crazy.
Even if the demo had gone flawlessly, Sean could have had some reservations, noting that these demos always focus on the “mechanical challenges” rather than the “really messy gray areas” on the social side.
“But what happens when a kid kicks Olaf?” Sean asked. “And then every other kid who sees Olaf get hit or spanked has their entire Disney trip ruined and the brand ruined?”
Read a preview of our conversation below, which has been edited for length and clarity.
Anthony: [CEO Jensen Huang] it basically said that every company should have an OpenClaw strategy now. I think it’s just too big a statement meant to get attention. I think it’s also interesting to come at such a transitional time for OpenClaw.
The founder has gone to OpenAI. So now this open source project can flourish and evolve beyond its creator, or it could languish. If companies like Nvidia invest heavily in it, then [it’s] more likely to continue to evolve. But it’ll be interesting to see a year from now, whether this feels like a cautionary statement or everyone’s like, “Open what?”
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Kirsten: In Nvidia’s case, it cost them nothing in the grand scheme of things to launch what they call NemoClaw, which is an open source project they created with the creator of OpenClaw. But if they don’t do something, they have a lot to lose. Really that message for me, as I translated it when Jensen was, “Every business needs to have an OpenClaw strategy,” was, “Nvidia needs to have a business solution or strategy, because if it’s successful, it’s one way or another for Nvidia to be part of a lot of other companies.” So doing nothing is a bigger risk than doing something that leads nowhere.
Sean: The real question here is why we haven’t talked about what clearly the end game is for Nvidia, and the thing that’s going to make it the first $100 trillion company, which is an Olaf robot.
Anthony: How could I forget?
Kirsten: Antonis, go at the end of the two and a half hours to see it.
So out comes Olaf the robot, and that’s something Jensen loves to do. He likes to have these demos and some of them go better than others. It’s also to show off Nvidia’s technology in robotics, and I don’t know if Olaf was actually talking in real time or if he was programmed — he felt a little programmed or had certain keywords that he used.
But the greatest part about it is that they had to cut his mic at the end because he just started walking around and talking to the crowd. And then he went to his little passage and went down slowly. And you could see it in the video. It was still talking, but no microphone.
Sean: Now we just need to give this little robot a wheelbase. And I know the perfect founder who can provide that.
I mean, these demos are always stupid. I don’t want to get on my soapbox, because I know we’ve talked about this a little bit earlier this week, but this was an impressive demo until it fell a little bit.
This is another very good example, though [how] Robotics is a really interesting engineering problem and a really interesting physics problem and a very interesting integration problem, and all of that, but this was presented as, in partnership with Disney, and it’s supposed to be the future of Disney parks and things like that: You’ll be able to walk around and see Olaf from “Frozen” and photograph it all.
But these efforts never take into account – or certainly don’t focus on events like this – all the other things to consider when owning such things. There’s a really cool YouTuber, Defunctland, who did this a very good video about it — four hours, not long — about the story of Disney trying to bring these kinds of robotics to its park, these automatons.
The engineering challenges are really interesting and it’s fun to watch this story, but it always comes back to the same question: Okay, but what happens when a kid kicks Olaf? And then every other kid who sees Olaf get kicked or punched has ruined their entire Disney trip and is ruining the brand?
There is so much to the social side of this. And this sounds silly, but that’s the question we’re kind of asking about humanoid robots. There’s so much hype about all these other things, and we just don’t hear as much discussion about the really messy gray areas on the social side of these things, and how to integrate them into people’s lives. We only hear about the engineering challenges — which again, are really impressive.
Kirsten: I have a counterpoint and then we have to get to the next one [topic]. This is a job creator, because Olaf should have a human babysitter at Disneyland, probably dressed as Elsa or something. You can imagine that actually, what we are doing is creating jobs [with] this mechanical experiment.
