Nvidia’s Jensen Huang: The incredible future of AI
Jensen Huang, the CEO of tech titan Nvidia, has a message for the world about artificial intelligence: You ain’t seen nothing yet.
Speaking to a standing room-only audience at the 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit, Huang predicted that in as little as five years AI will be able to pass every test a human takes — not just the legal bar exams that it can complete today, but also highly specialized medical licensing exams.
In about 10 years, he said, the computational capabilities of AI systems will be a million times bigger than they are today. Systems synthetically generating data will have greater capacity to continuously learn, infer, and imagine. Instead of only instantly answering questions, forthcoming AI systems will also have the ability to think critically through problems over longer periods of time.
“In the future, the way you interact with AI will be very different” from what can be done with ChatGPT and other AI models today, said Huang in a keynote question-and-answer session led by John Shoven, a SIEPR senior fellow, emeritus; and the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics, emeritus, in Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
But does this mean AI technology will be able to mimic the human mind? Huang said he wasn’t sure. There needs to be a consensus about what it means to say AI has achieved human intelligence.
In order to have true artificial general intelligence, he said, “you need to know what the definition of success is.”
The gift of pain and suffering
Having co-founded Nvidia more than 30 years ago, Huang now finds himself at the center of the tech universe. His company, whose market value hit $2 trillion last month (after reaching $1 trillion the previous June), has rocketed thanks to its sophisticated and hugely expensive semiconductor chips and its estimated market share of more than 80 percent in AI chips.
“We sell the world’s first quarter-million-dollar chip,” Huang noted, referring to Nvidia’s powerful graphical processing unit system that weighs 70 pounds, consists of 35,000 parts and has the computing capacity of a data center.
During his Summit appearance, Huang regaled attendees with his insights and now-familiar deadpan humor. Asked about his signature outfit of black leather jacket, black shirt, and black pants, Huang said they are among the few pieces of clothing that don’t make him itch.
When asked his advice for Stanford students aspiring to be successful entrepreneurs, Huang talked about the importance of low expectations and high resilience. Greatness, he said, comes from smart people who have suffered from setbacks. This is why, at Nvidia, he talks openly about pain and suffering “with great glee.”
“For all of you Stanford students,” he said, “I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering.”