AI exports bigger opportunities for India than chips, says Nvidia’s Huang

“Remember, other countries have been making chips… for a long time,” Huang said during his visit to the city Thursday for the Nvidia AI Summit. “No one is manufacturing intelligence right now. Before all the other countries jump into that, India should jump into it.”

The tech icon, who has risen to global prominence in recent years, advocated for India to leverage local software prowess to shift from being a back office that handles coding for global companies to exporting artificial intelligence products.

“He’s a cousin; It is a very close relationship on the part of the IT industry. “It’s so close, why go too far?” Huang said, calling AI export a multi-billion dollar opportunity.

India also has vast amounts of data to train artificial intelligence models and renewable energy to power IT infrastructure, he said.

“I think the future will be India developing AI and AI being exported,” Huang said. “When you do, India will be a gigantic business opportunity for us.”

‘AI won’t take your job’

Dressed in his usual all-black outfit, including his trademark leather jacket, Huang managed to fill a room as big as a football field with attendees, who listened spellbound as he shared his ideas about artificial intelligence.

“AI cannot do everything we do. But it can do 20% of our jobs 1,000 times better. So everyone should use AI for that 20%,” he said in response to a question from Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar.

“AI will not take your job. The person who uses AI will take your job,” Huang said, using his catchphrases: his energy and humor on stage masking his fatigue after stops in Florida and Copenhagen on his way to Mumbai from California, all in three days.

Moore’s Law, a popular observation in the technology industry, says that the number of transistors that can be installed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. More transistors mean more computing power.

Also read | Nvidia’s partnership with Reliance and Tatas to boost India’s AI infrastructure

Huang said current computer hardware technology has reached its limits in terms of how many transistors can be packed into a chip and, by extension, how powerful processors can be.

“We can no longer afford to do nothing in software and expect to improve the computing experience,” he said. “We started our company to improve software.”

Nvidia makes high-end graphics processing units (GPUs) that, along with the company’s CUDA software, handle multiple simpler tasks simultaneously instead of handling complex calculations performed by conventional processors. Every year, the computing power of these GPUs grows by a factor of 4, Huang said, surpassing Moore’s Law.

These GPUs, which first revolutionized the gaming industry, are now considered the backbone of the AI ​​revolution. Nvidia’s latest Hopper GPU and upcoming Blackwell GPU are the building blocks of large servers that handle computing for AI.

To be sure, just a month before OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the first generative AI application based on Nvidia chips, launched, Nvidia was worth $275 billion. In the 24 months since then, its market capitalization has increased 12-fold. The unprecedented rise catapulted the chipmaker ahead of Elon Musk’s Tesla into the world’s second most valuable spot. Nvidia’s valuation of $3.4 billion is just behind Apple’s $3.5 billion as of Thursday.

Also read | Tata Comms gets first batch of Nvidia AI chips, internal rollout begins: MD

The rally has also made Huang one of the richest people on the planet, with a net worth of $122 billion as of Thursday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

While Nvidia and Huang’s leather jacket were revered symbols in the gaming industry for more than three decades, the AI ​​euphoria has turned them into global icons. Although gamers often lament the limited availability of PC graphics cards, Nvidia and Huang certainly wouldn’t complain.

Next generation games

Huang hopes that generative AI will revolutionize the next generation of video games. With AI, developers can generate realistic landscapes, characters, and objects at a lower cost. AI-powered chatbots will allow characters to engage in dynamic conversations, develop their own stories, and recognize individual players. This will create an immersive gaming experience, where players interact with intelligent and responsive characters in vibrant AI-created worlds.

Huang said India’s gaming industry has huge potential, but its growth depends on greater accessibility. “For the gaming industry to really take off in India, we need to close the broadband gap,” he said. But he expressed optimism, citing progress in delivering wireless broadband to every home.

While a third of Nvidia’s talent pool is based in India, Huang noted that the country does not contribute much to the company’s revenue. The trend is endemic in the tech industry, as many global tech giants have a large workforce in India but relatively little revenue.

And read | Mint Explainer: What the OpenAI o1 ‘reasoning’ model means for the future of GenAI

According to Jayanth Kolla, co-founder of technology consultancy Convergence Catalyst, that may change for Nvidia.

“The growth of data centers in India will be inevitable and in this growth there will be a proliferation of data centers in smaller cities beyond the current centers as we continue to use more and more data,” he said Kolla. “This gives us Nvidia is practically an endless market to continue targeting, because in the long term, the applicability of AI will only proliferate in more and more applications, so Huang will continue to generate the kind of hype it is seeing in India currently “

Huang also sees a growing role for AI in cybersecurity. Today, organizations manage large sets of sensitive data that are proprietary or intellectual property of customers.

“For cybersecurity, our biggest contribution is to create technology that all cybersecurity companies can use,” Huang said, explaining how cybersecurity companies use AI and Nvidia computing technology to build firewalls. Another use case for AI is to systematically review all cyber warnings to segregate false threats more quickly “to strike a balance between caution and generating too much data can overwhelm the IT group.”

He repeatedly emphasized that it is important to develop AI technology “safely.”

Shouvik Das contributed to this story.

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Posted: Oct 24, 2024, 09:42 pm IST