Mark Theriault based the startup FITY envisioning a line of intelligent cooling merchandise: chilly drink holders that include freezable pucks to maintain drinks chilly for longer with out the mess of ice. The entrepreneur began with 3D prints of merchandise in his basement, constructing one unit at a time, earlier than ultimately scaling to mass manufacturing.
Founding a shopper product firm from scratch was a tall order for a single particular person. Going from preliminary sketches to production-ready designs was a serious problem. To carry his inventive imaginative and prescient to life, Theriault relied on AI and his NVIDIA GeForce RTX-equipped system. For him, AI isn’t only a instrument — it’s a complete pipeline to assist him accomplish his targets. Learn extra about his workflow under.
Plus, GeForce RTX 5050 laptops begin arriving immediately at retailers worldwide, from $999. GeForce RTX 5050 Laptop computer GPUs characteristic 2,560 NVIDIA Blackwell CUDA cores, fifth-generation AI Tensor Cores, fourth-generation RT Cores, a ninth-generation NVENC encoder and a sixth-generation NVDEC decoder.
As well as, NVIDIA’s Plug and Play: Mission G-Help Plug-In Hackathon — working nearly via Wednesday, July 16 — invitations builders to discover AI and construct customized G-Help plug-ins for an opportunity to win prizes. Save the date for the G-Help Plug-In webinar on Wednesday, July 9, from 10-11 a.m. PT, to be taught extra about Mission G-Help capabilities and fundamentals, and to take part in a dwell Q&A session.
From Idea to Completion
To create his standout merchandise, Theriault tinkers with potential FITY Flex cooler designs with conventional strategies, from sketch to computer-aided design to fast prototyping, till he finds the appropriate imaginative and prescient. A novel facet of the FITY Flex design is that it may be personalized with enjoyable, well-liked shoe charms.
For packaging design inspiration, Theriault makes use of his most well-liked text-to-image generative AI mannequin for prototyping, Secure Diffusion XL — which runs 60% quicker with the NVIDIA TensorRT software program improvement package — utilizing the modular, node-based interface ComfyUI.
ComfyUI offers customers granular management over each step of the technology course of — prompting, sampling, mannequin loading, picture conditioning and post-processing. It’s supreme for superior customers like Theriault who wish to customise how photos are generated.
NVIDIA and GeForce RTX GPUs primarily based on the NVIDIA Blackwell structure embrace fifth-generation Tensor Cores designed to speed up AI and deep studying workloads. These GPUs work with CUDA optimizations in PyTorch to seamlessly speed up ComfyUI, lowering technology time on FLUX.1-dev, a picture technology mannequin from Black Forest Labs, from two minutes per picture on the Mac M3 Extremely to about 4 seconds on the GeForce RTX 5090 desktop GPU.
ComfyUI can even add ControlNets — AI fashions that assist management picture technology — that Theriault makes use of for duties like guiding human poses, setting compositions by way of depth mapping and changing scribbles to pictures.
Theriault even creates his personal fine-tuned fashions to maintain his fashion constant. He used low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fashions — small, environment friendly adapters into particular layers of the community — enabling hyper-customized technology with minimal compute value.
“Over the previous few months, I’ve been shifting from AI-assisted laptop graphics renders to completely AI-generated product imagery utilizing a customized Flux LoRA I educated in home. My RTX 4080 SUPER GPU has been important for getting the efficiency I would like to coach and iterate rapidly.” – Mark Theriault, founding father of FITY
Theriault additionally faucets into generative AI to create advertising and marketing property like FITY Flex product packaging. He makes use of FLUX.1, which excels at producing legible textual content inside photos, addressing a standard problem in text-to-image fashions.
Although FLUX.1 fashions can sometimes eat over 23GB of VRAM, NVIDIA has collaborated with Black Forest Labs to assist cut back the scale of those fashions utilizing quantization — a way that reduces mannequin measurement whereas sustaining high quality. The fashions have been then accelerated with TensorRT, which offers an as much as 2x speedup over PyTorch.
To simplify utilizing these fashions in ComfyUI, NVIDIA created the FLUX.1 NIM microservice, a containerized model of FLUX.1 that may be loaded in ComfyUI and allows FP4 quantization and TensorRT help. Mixed, the fashions come down to simply over 11GB of VRAM, and efficiency improves by 2.5x.
Theriault makes use of the Blender Cycles app to render out ultimate information. For 3D workflows, NVIDIA presents the AI Blueprint for 3D-guided generative AI to ease the positioning and composition of 3D photos, so anybody on this methodology can rapidly get began.
Lastly, Theriault makes use of giant language fashions to generate advertising and marketing copy — tailor-made for SEO, tone and storytelling — in addition to to finish his patent and provisional functions, work that normally prices 1000’s of {dollars} in authorized charges and appreciable time.
“As a one-man band with a ton of content material to generate, having on-the-fly technology capabilities for my product designs actually helps velocity issues up.” – Mark Theriault, founding father of FITY
Each texture, each phrase, each photograph, each accent was a micro-decision, Theriault stated. AI helped him survive the “loss of life by a thousand cuts” that may stall solo startup founders, he added.
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