With the launch of ChatGPT, Generative AI has taken over the world by storm. However, while the world now applauds the tremendous milestones Sam Altman and his team at Open AI have achieved or Satya Nadella for the shrewd investments he made, we often miss out on one of the critical factors. That is NVIDIA and how its hardware powered these recent leaps in Generative AI. 

As part of NVIDIA's GTC 2023, India AI interacted with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang regarding the future of Accelerated Computing, Artificial Intelligence and the impact of Generative AI on emerging economies like India. 

The inflexion point in AI

According to Jensen, accelerated computing and AI have arrived. He points out three fundamental forces that are the governing dynamics triggering and driving these changes in computing.

"Number one and foremost is our ability to continue to grow computing demand in a way that's sustainable for the planet is nearly impossible unless we accelerate every workload," said Huang. 

"The second is, of course, the incredible breakthrough of ChatGPT- this AI that's heard around the world. NVIDIA's DGX AI supercomputer, which is the world's first AI supercomputer, is the engine behind the large language model breakthrough and triggered the inflexion of AI," added Huang.

This Generative AI breakthrough has resulted in a step-function increase in AI training and inference. 

Jensen Huang believes that Generative AI has finally caused the inflexion point in AI. He calls it the iPhone moment for AI as a new computing platform has been developed and emerged. Historically we have witnessed the emergence of a new computing platform every 15 years. The PC revolution, the internet revolution, and the mobile cloud are all examples that created a new computing paradigm with new companies and applications enabling us to 'program' the computer in a new way. And Generative AI with Large Language Model Foundation is the same.

"This is a new computing model that you program in a new way, and this new way is using human language," stated Huang. "The first computer you can program in any language you like; English, Chinese, French, Japanese, however, you like to do it," he added. 

As per Jensen Huang, the third fundamental force driving these changes in computing is digitalization. "So far, most of AI has happened in the world of software, visual, recommender systems, how we interact with the web and now with Chat GPT, large language models connected to office automation, office applications and productivity applications. All of it is so far digital. But yet, the world's largest industries are physical. They make physical things, but they would like to design it digitally", explained Huang.

"We created a platform that helps the world's industries become digital, and we call it Omniverse. Omniverse is a digital, physical operating system for the world's industries to digitalize," he added. 

Generative AI and its impact 

One major catalyst behind the current Generative AI leap is the technology called transformer models. A transformer model is a neural network that learns context and thus meaning by tracking relationships in sequential data like the words in this sentence. Transformer models apply an evolving set of mathematical techniques, called attention or self-attention, to detect subtle ways even distant data elements in a series influence and depend on each other.

According to Jensen Huang, these transformer models offer potential beyond language models. 

"Its ability to process and code, to compress a lot of information into the neural networks, is very effective. You can use it for language, you can even use it for images, you can use it for proteins, chemicals, videos, and so there are many languages you can learn using the transformer model."

He further explained the role these models could play beyond chatGPT.

" In the case of proteins, you can understand the proteins and produce proteins because you understand the meaning of proteins. And so this capability has proven incredibly valuable. And I think that over the next several years, you're gonna see one industry after another industry applying large language models."

He also emphasized the importance of hardware in this transformation, especially the capability of NVIDIA's Hopper GPU, designed to understand these large language models. 

Generative AI: The most powerful democratization force

Despite raising wide applause and excitement, Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have also raised many questions regarding jobs and opportunities, especially in emerging economies like India, which has a huge youth population.

According to Jensen Huang, Generative AI can be a force of positive impact on countries like India. 

"I believe this is the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to close and to bring together the social divide and the technology divide," stated Huang. 

"For the last 30-40 years, there's only so many people who know how to program a computer. The number of people who knows how to use this incredible instrument for the benefit of themselves or their business or their country is really quite limited."

"And yet, all of a sudden, there's a new type of computer, this new type of computer, you don't have to learn C, C++, you don't have to learn Pascal, you don't have to learn Fortran, you don't have to learn Java. You don't even have to learn Python. You just have to speak your language. And by communicating to this computer what you need, what you want, what problems you want to have solved, this computer will write the software by itself." 

He theorizes that everyone is a computer programmer now. 

"This is going to have the greatest opportunity for us to democratize this very powerful instrument we call the computer for the very first time in history," he said. 

"I believe it will lift so many segments of society. It will bring great education to people who don't have access to education. It's the most powerful democratization force I've ever seen," he concluded. 

Image source: NVIDIA