Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has decided to try something a bit different in his latest defense of the company’s recently revealed DLSS 5 neural rendering tech. No longer does he throw cold coffee in the faces of critics and bellow ‘you’re dead wrong, and you better give me something on this guy or you’re toast’. Instead, he sits on the desk like a teacher playing it casual – saying that he understands where critics are coming from, but still insisting that the tech’s benign.
“I think their perspective makes sense and I can see where they’re coming from, because I don’t love AI slop myself,” Huang said when asked about the backlash to DLSS 5 in a new interview with Lex Fridman. “You know, all of the AI generated content increasingly looks similar and they’re all beautiful. So, I’m empathetic towards what [critics of the tech are] thinking.
That empathising aside, Huang’s still sticking to his guns that those who aren’t gushing about DLSS 5 don’t quite understand how it works. “That’s just not what DLSS 5 is trying to do,” he continued. “I showed several examples of it, but DLSS 5 is 3D conditioned, 3D guided. It’s ground truth structure data guided. And so the artist determined the geometry, we are completely truthful to the geometry in every single frame.”
The CEO went on to provide the example of a “toon shader” that would lead the AI to “generate in the style of that, all consistent with the artistry, you know, the style, the intent of the artist”, asserting yet again that DLSS 5 isn’t just a post-processing filter whacked over the top of a game’s design, but “one more tool” baked into the process of artists dictating what a game looks like. He also noted that developers don’t have to use it, though that assertion doesn’t necessarily seem to take into account that developers are often beholden to CEOs and companies who might well want to go all-in on the tech regardless of what their employees think.
Concerns over the tech’s potential to make a bunch of games look samey or like dodgy internet ads aren’t going to go away unless DLSS 5 debuts and somehow proves that it won’t do such things, no matter whether Huang’s attempts to reassure the masses take on good or bad cop form. If anything, I’d say the exec’s flip flopping in tone makes it tougher not to be cynical about Nvidia’s face-changing baby – if Huang seems willing to couch his defences in whichever way he thinks will go down best, how much of those defences might just be telling folks what Nvidia think they want to hear?
