On 21st March 2022, NVIDIA’s commenced its GPU Technology Conference, more commonly known as GTC. NVIDIA’s founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivered the keynote address on 22nd March, marking the beginning of the four-day event. The conference will include product launches, announcements, expert panel discussions and many more. INDIAai caught up with Jensen Huang in the Q&A session on his plans for India and vision for AI.
Jensen, amazing to see great lineup of innovation here at GTC 2022. India is a country with a lot of talent pool and many resources. Can you tell us what your vision for India is?
Our three largest geographies are California, China and India, and I think India is slightly larger than China. That’s NVIDIA’s footprint. We have lots of plans and new ideas for India, and we’re always hiring from India all the time. So if you have a lot of AI friends, you send them to NVIDIA.
You showcased a really fantastic lineup of products and solutions coming from NVIDIA, such as the Earth 2.0, Fourcast Net, H 100 chip and many more. How do you see these solutions translate to impact in the global south, especially in emerging countries?
There is a giant technology gulf, what is called the technology divide. Technology has benefited the developed country a lot more than it has benefited the developing countries. And the reason is there are more people who know how to program a computer and develop the most advanced software in developed countries. And those people are rare. So the west, in the last generation of the computer revolution, has benefited dramatically from the advances in computing.
Computers are used everywhere, but programming computers at the highest level is really in the world of developing countries and the west. Although there are very few people in the world who know how to program in C++, there are many people who know how to apply AI.
The reason for that is very simple. AI is software that writes by itself. It writes software that no human can write or even better than any computer scientist in the world.
Another way of saying this is that we have democratized computer science with AI. For example, you hear so many stories of kids in high school teaching software how to be a robot. One of my favourite stories that I heard was about a cucumber farmer in Japan, where the son came home and taught an AI program how to sort cucumbers. Sorting cucumber is an impossible program to write. There are so many shapes. And if you sort it properly, you can maximize your profits.
This kid taught an AI how to sort cucumbers, and, that piece of software, no humans would’ve been able to write. No companies would’ve written for him. Now because AI democratized computer science, he could do it for himself, and he did it for his family.
I believe that AI is going to absolutely revolutionize the technology industry of India. The number of startups in India is skyrocketing, and every single one of them relies on AI. And the reason for that is because the technology is basically open source. Although the ability to create the original algorithms is less likely, the ability to teach that AI how to do something smart in the world or India is possible.
I think AI is going to close the technology divide. It’s going to democratize technology, and it’s going to elevate the developing countries.
India has recently announced a National Semiconductor Mission. Do Nvidia have a plan for India in that space?
We build chips; we buy a lot of chips because NVIDIA is a systems company. Whether we design the chips or we connect to other people’s chips, all of our reference systems that we keep open and the blueprint we create for it include our chips and other people’s chips. – In fact, a whole bunch of other people’s chips.
We partner with Marvell; we partner with Broadcom; we partner with Intel and AMD. And we would love to partner Ti and Linear and- you name it. We would love to partner with chip companies in India as well, so that we could advance the industry together.
