'Beginning of new industrial revolution': Nvidia's Jensen Huang says there's an AI 'awakening' in every country

Nvidia founder Jensen Huang has described the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as the beginning of a new industrial revolution, emphasising that there's an ongoing global 'awakening' concerning AI technology. Huang's company, which designs and manufactures graphics processing units (GPUs), is at the forefront of the AI revolution.  

In a conversation with Omar Al Olama, UAE’s Minister of AI, at the World Governments Summit in UAE on Monday, Huang emphasised that AI technology must be democratised so that all countries can avail the benefits. 
  
"It is absolutely true, we have to democratise this technology and the reason why is very clear. There's an awakening of every single country, in probably the last six months, that artificial intelligence is a technology you can't be mystified by, you cannot be terrified by it, you have to find a way to activate yourself to take advantage of it. And the reason for that is because this is the beginning of a new industrial revolution," the Nvidia CEO said. 

On the approach to AI at a policy level, Huang flagged the importance of countries taking ownership. 

"This industrial revolution is about the production not of energy, not of food, but the production of intelligence. Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, which is the reason why there's this idea called Sovereign AI: You own your own data, nobody owns it," he said.

Stressing on AI architecture, he said the technology codifies 'culture', 'society's intelligence', 'history', so countries cannot allow that to be done by other people. 

The Nvidia chief suggested that the onus is on countries to take the initiative now that the technology is easily available.

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"We've democratised the computation of AI, the infrastructure of AI. The rest of it is really up to you [countries] to take initiative, activate your industry, build the infrastructure as fast as you can so that the researchers, the companies, your governments can take advantage of this infrastructure to go and create your own AI," he said.

Giving a roadmap, Huang suggested that every country can first build an AI infrastructure and codify their language into a large language model. 

"If you want to automate the creation of artificial intelligence, you have to build the infrastructure. It's not that costly, it is also not that hard. Companies all around the world, of course, want to mystify, terrify, glorify. But the fact of the matter is they're computers. You can buy them off the shelf. You can install it.  Every country already has the expertise to do this. You need to have the imperative to go activate that. The first thing I would do is I would codify the language, the data of your culture into your own large language model," Huang said.  

But that's just a start. There are multiple areas where countries can leverage AI, according to Huang. 

"Remember that AI is not just about language. We're seeing several AI revolutions happening at the same time: AI for language, AI for biology  (learning the language of proteins and chemicals), AI for physical sciences, learning the AI of climate, materials, energy discovery, AI of IoT, AI for Robotics and autonomous systems, manufacturing and such," he said. 

"There's AI revolutions, great breakthroughs happening in all of these different domains. If you build the infrastructure, you will activate the researchers in every one of these domains. Without the internet, how can you be digital? Without farms, how can you produce food? Without an AI infrastructure, how can you activate all of the researchers that are in your region to go and create the AI models?"

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