Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on AI

The future of AI, coding and the biggest breakthrough of 2023

Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang recently appeared as a guest at the World Governments Summit, held in Dubai on the 12th-14th of February 2024. In a face-to-face interview, he was asked questions by Omar Sultan Al Olama the Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence of the UAE. He had some very interesting things to say about whether kids should learn how to code, what he considered to be the greatest AI breakthrough last year and the future of AI.

Here’s what he had to say.

Minister:

You touched upon um the issue of I would say authentic ignorance the fear-mongering AI taking over the world and um I, I think there is a requirement for us to clarify where the hype is real and where artificial intelligence really has the power to create a lot of disruption and to harm us and where AI is going to be good. What do you think is the biggest issue when it comes to artificial intelligence right now …

Huang:

Excellent question um first of all whatever new incredible technology is being created you go back to the earliest of times uh it is absolutely true we have to develop the technology safely. We have to apply the technology safely and we have to help people use the technology safely and so whether it’s um uh the plane that I came in cars Manufacturing Systems medicine all of these different Industries are heavily regulated today. Those regulations have to be extended augmented to consider artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence will come to us through products and services it is the automation of intelligence and it will be augmented on top of all of these various Industries. Now it is the case that that there are some interests to scare people about this uh new technology to mystify this technology to encourage other people to not do anything about that technology and rely on them to do it and I think that that’s a mistake we want to democratize this technology.

Huang went on to answer his own question of what he thought was the biggest AI breakthrough of 2023.

Let’s face it the single most important thing that has happened last year. Iif you were to ask me the one single most important event last year and how it has activated AI researchers here in this region it’s actually llama2. It’s an open- Source model or Falcon another excellent model very true, Mistral excellent model. I just, I just saw another one, smaug. There’s so many open source models. Innovations on safety alignment, Guard railing, reinforcement learning. So many different reasoning, so many different innovations that are happening on top of transparencies, explainability. All of this technology that has to be built, all were possible because of some of these open source languages and so I think that democratizing, activating every region, activating every country to join the AI Advance is probably one of the most important thing rather than convincing everybody it’s too complicated. It’s too dangerous, it’s too mythical and only two or three people in the world should be able to do that. That I think is a huge mistake .

Minster:

… so graphic processing units that you guys are, are supplying the world what do you think the next era is going to depend on. Is it going to continuously be built on gpus is there something else as a breakthrough that we’re going to see in the future

Huang:

Actually, you know that that in just about all of the large companies in the world there are internal developments. At Google there’s tpus, at AWS there’s tranium, at Microsoft there’s Maya. Meta has chips that they’re building in China. Just about every single CSP has chips that they’re building. The reason why you mention inidia gpus is NVIDIA GPU is the only platform that’s available to everybody on any platform. That’s actually the observation it’s not that we’re the only platform that’s being used. Wwe’re simply the only platform that’s used that democratizes AI for everybody’s platform. We’re in every single Cloud we’re in every single data center were available in the cloud in your private data centers all the way out to the edge all the way out to autonomous systems Robotics and self-driving Cars. One single architecture spans all of that. That’s what makes Nvidia unique

Minster:

I want to talk about education so today knowing what you know seeing what you see and being at The Cutting Edge of the technology what should people focus on when it comes to education what should they learn how should they educate their kids and their societies

Wow excellent question. I’m going to say something and it it’s, it’s going to sound completely opposite of what people feel you, you. You probably recall over the course of the last 10 years 15 years almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science. Eeverybody should learn how to program and in fact it’s it’s almost exactly the opposite. It is our job to create Computing technology such that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle, this is the miracle of artificial intelligence. For the very first time we have closed the Gap. The technology divide has been completely closed and this is the reason why so many people can engage artificial intelligence. It is the reason why every single government, every single industrial conference, every single company is talking about artificial intelligence today. Because for the very first time you can imagine everybody in your company being a technologist. And so this is a tremendous time for all of you to realize that the technology divide has been closed …

What did you think of Jensen’s answers and vision of the future, inspiring, worrying, let me know?

A full video of Jensens’s interview with the minister is readily available on YouTube and other platforms if you want to check it out.

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