The Emergence of Agentic AI: A New Era for the Computer Industry
The Rise of Agentic AI and Reasoning Models
The end of 2024 and beginning of 2025 brought us two interrelated AI trends: the rise of agentic AI and emergence of reasoning models. Together, these technologies have the potential to upend how entire industries automate their processes. Agentic AI refers to semi- or fully autonomous AI applications, or agents, making decisions and taking actions on behalf of humans. Meanwhile, reasoning models, such as DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate the power of model distillation (building a smaller model from the results of larger models) and using a mixture of experts (MoE) approach to get better results.
The Impact on Software Engineers
Software engineers will be among the first professions impacted by AI agents, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "I’m certain that 100% of the software engineers will be AI-assisted by the end of this year, and so agents will be everywhere," he said. "So we need a new line of computers."
The Need for New Hardware and Software
The emergence of agentic AI will require different hardware and software. Software will be generated by computers instead of written by hand. Reasoning models will require 100x more compute than first-gen GenAI required. Customers will need to balance the tradeoffs between accuracy, latency, and power consumption in a way they haven’t had to up to this point.
Nvidia’s Roadmap for the Future
Nvidia has plans to ship a Blackwell Ultra chip in the second half of 2025, followed by the next generation of GPU chips, the Rubin, which will be paired with a Vera CPU to create a Vera Rubin superchip. In the second half of 2027, Nvidia plans to ship a Vera Rubin Ultra. But Vera Rubin Ultra is only the beginning of the story. Huang wants to completely reinvent not only how computers are built to support this emerging workload, but how entire data centers are architected.
The Future of Data Centers
The old way of building data centers is going to change. Instead of data centers, we’ll have AI factories that generate value using AI. "It has one job and one job only: Generating these incredible tokens that we then reconstitute into music, into words, into videos, into research, into chemicals and proteins," Huang said. "So the world is going through a transition in not just the amount of data centers that will be built, but also how it is built. Everything in the data center will be accelerated."
Conclusion
The emergence of agentic AI and reasoning models will have a transformative effect on the computer industry, not just on how we write and run software, but how we build entire data centers. Nvidia is positioning itself to lead this revolution, with a roadmap that includes the development of new GPU chips, photonic switches, and a new type of superchip. As the industry transitions to this new era of computing, one thing is clear: the world will never be the same again.
FAQs
Q: What is agentic AI?
A: Agentic AI refers to semi- or fully autonomous AI applications, or agents, making decisions and taking actions on behalf of humans.
Q: What is a reasoning model?
A: A reasoning model is a type of AI model that uses a mixture of experts (MoE) approach to get better results.
Q: How will software engineers be impacted by AI agents?
A: Software engineers will be among the first professions impacted by AI agents, with 100% of software engineers expected to be AI-assisted by the end of 2025.
Q: What is the future of data centers?
A: The old way of building data centers is going to change. Instead of data centers, we’ll have AI factories that generate value using AI.
