NVIDIA made a judgment call on its developer blog this week: The complexity of Agent systems (AI programs that autonomously invoke tools, spawn sub-tasks, and manage memory) is spiraling out of control, and the traditional "siloed engineering" approach is no longer sufficient.
What this is
NVIDIA calls it Extreme Co-Design. The core thesis is straightforward: When Agents no longer act on preset scripts but autonomously decide which tools to invoke, what sub-tasks to generate, and when to terminate, system variables grow exponentially. This means hardware, middleware, and orchestration frameworks can no longer be optimized in isolation and then pieced together; they must be co-designed from day one. In other words, NVIDIA is saying that just selling better GPUs isn't enough—the entire chain must be designed together, and we are the only ones who can do this.
Industry view
This judgment is being validated by top players: Both OpenAI and Anthropic are building their own Agent orchestration layers rather than adopting off-the-shelf frameworks. But the opposition is equally vocal—some architects argue that most enterprise Agent use cases today are still single-step tool calls, and "Extreme Co-Design" is a demand limited to a few trillion-parameter players. Rebuilding infrastructure for this prematurely only adds engineering complexity and cost. We note that the essence of this divide is: Are you paying for today's Agents, or for the Agents of two years from now?
Impact on regular people
For enterprise IT: The focus of Agent Ops will shift from "deploying models" to "managing behavior chains," requiring a re-evaluation of infrastructure budgets and team capabilities. For individual careers: Understanding that an Agent is not a smarter chatbot, but an autonomous decision-making software process—this cognitive gap will create significant efficiency disparities among people in the next two years. For the consumer market: No direct impact in the short term, but the underlying rebuild means next-generation AI products will be an order of magnitude more complex than today's chat windows.