Every country needs to own the production of their own intelligence, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees at the World Governments Summit in Dubai this week.
Huang, speaking as part of a fireside chat with the UAE’s Minister of AI, Omar Al Olama, describes sovereign AI – which emphasises a country’s ownership over its data and the intelligence it produces – as an enormous opportunity for the world’s leaders.
“It codifies your culture, your society’s intelligence, your common sense, your history – you own your own data,” Huang says.
“We completely subscribe to that vision,” Al Olama says. “That’s why the UAE is moving aggressively on creating large language models and mobilising compute.”
Huang urges leaders not to be “mystified” by AI. AI’s unprecedented ability to take directions from ordinary humans makes it critical for countries to embrace AI, infusing it with local languages and expertise.
Responding to Al Olama’s question about how he might approach AI if he were the leader of a developing nation, Huang emphasises the importance of building infrastructure.
“It’s not that costly, it is also not that hard,” Huang says. “The first thing that I would do, of course, is I would codify the language, the data of your culture into your own large language model.
“NVIDIA GPU is the only platform that’s available to everybody on any platform,” he adds. “This ubiquity has not only democratised AI but facilitated a wave of innovation that spans from cloud computing to autonomous systems and beyond.”
This promises to unleash new kinds of innovations that go beyond what’s traditionally been thought of as information technology.
Huang even counters advice offered by many visionaries over the years who urged young people to study computer science in order to compete in the information age. No longer.
“In fact, it’s almost exactly the opposite,” he says. “It is our job to create computing technologies that nobody has to program and that the programming language is human: everybody in the world is now a programmer — that is the miracle.”
Featured picture: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at the World Governments Summit.
Credit: Nvidia