Nvidia unveiled a prototype AI avatar at CES 2025 that lives on your PC’s desktop. The AI assistant, R2X, looks like a video game character, and it can help you navigate apps on your computer.
The R2X avatar is rendered and animated using Nvidia’s AI models, and users can run the avatar on popular LLMs of their choice, such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o or xAI’s Grok. Users can talk with R2X through text and voice, upload files to it for processing, or even enable the AI assistant to view what’s happening live on your screen or camera.
Tech companies are creating a lot of AI avatars recently, not just in video games but also for enterprise and consumer customers. The early demoes are strange, but some think these avatars are a promising user interface for AI assistants. With R2X, Nvidia is trying to combine generative video game capabilities with cutting-edge LLMs to create an AI assistant that looks and feels like a human.
The company plans to open-source these avatars in the first half of 2025. Nvidia sees this as a new user interface for developers to build with, allowing users to plug in their favorite AI software products or even run these avatars locally.
Much like Microsoft’s Recall feature (which has been delayed due to privacy concerns), R2X can take constant screenshots of your screen and run them through an AI model for processing, though this feature is turned off by default. When on, it can offer feedback on applications running on your computer and, for example, help you work through a complex coding task.
R2X is still a prototype, and even Nvidia admits there are still some bugs to work out. In demos with TechCrunch, Nvidia’s avatar had an uncanny-valley feel to it — its face sometimes got stuck in odd positions, and its tone felt a little aggressive at times. And broadly, I find it a little odd to have a humanoid avatar stare at me while I work.
R2X generally offered helpful instructions and accurately viewed what was on the screen. But at on …