I had the pleasure of attending a keynote by Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, hosted by ATxInspire Singapore. Below are a few highlights from a leader who has profoundly influenced our technological landscape:
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The Fourth Industrial Revolution: In the third industrial revolution, we converted water and heat to manufacture energy in the form of electricity, now we are now converting electrons (raw data) into electrons (tokens) to manufacture a far more valuable resource, intelligence.
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Most manufacturers will have two factories: One factory producing their product and one AI factory to power the software of their product or optimise their physical factory with a digital twin.
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Becoming the world’s leading quantum computing company without building a quantum computer: NVIDIA are focusing on quantum simulations and bridging the interaction between quantum computers and classical computing
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Computer architecture abstracted to new levels each decade: The future of personal computing may involve a general LLM acting as a CPU (powered by GPUs) surrounded by specialist LLMs. Perhaps Andrej Karpathy’s teaser of the LLM OS is not a pipe dream?
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NVIDIA are focusing on two domains of autonomous driving and biology: Computer aided drug discovery and genome sequencing will have a profound impact to our lives in the coming years.
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Singapore’s new National AI Strategy 2.0 is well thought through and compelling strategy and testament to Singapore’s aspiration to being an AI hub. AI will play an important role in keeping this 6 million population nation competitive in the world-stage by leveraging a digital workforce.
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LLMs are good at fast thinking (fast generation/inference) but work still needs to be done in slow thinking or reasoning - where a machine takes days, weeks, months to optimise a solution for a complex problem. Even bigger impacts from AI are yet to come.
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Advice to startups and his younger self: find your niche, avoid doing anything that other people can do, and be specialised across several domains
NVIDIA Founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, charming the crowd
Jensen and NVIDIA’s journey, from the brink of bankruptcy to becoming the world’s 6th most valuable company, is a testament to their resilience and dedication to their niche of accelerated computing. Reflecting on Jensen Huang’s inspiring words, I’m more energised than ever to contribute to this AI-driven era.