In a highly anticipated panel discussion at SIGGRAPH 2024, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the transformative potential of open source artificial intelligence and virtual assistants.
During the informal dialogue, the two highlighted the potential of the generative AI revolution, with deep roots in visual computing, and how it will increasingly amplify human creativity while accelerated computing will ensure significant gains in energy efficiency, as reported on the official NVIDIA blog. “Accelerated computing helps you save a lot of energy, 20 times, 50 times, doing the same work,” explained Huang, addressing the increasingly current issue of the energy consumption of these systems. “The first thing we need to do, as a society, is to accelerate every application possible: this reduces the amount of energy used worldwide..”
Zuckerberg opened the discussion by announcing the launch of AI Studio, a new platform that lets users create, share, and discover AI characters, making AI more accessible to millions of creators and small businesses. “Every single restaurant, every single website will probably, in the future, have these AIs,” Huang said. “...just like every company has an email address, a website and a social media account, I think in the future every company will have an AI,” Zuckerberg responded. “Almost every industry will be impacted by this, whether it’s scientific computing to improve weather forecasts with less energy, or collaborating with creators to generate images or virtual scenes for industrial visualization,” Huang continued. “Self-driving robot cars will all be transformed by generative AI.”
Here is the video of the event
Huang then praised Meta for its advances in AI, citing advances in computer vision, language models, and real-time translation.You have done an amazing job with AI,” Huang said. “We all use PyTorch, which comes from Meta.” Zuckerberg stressed the importance of open source in advancing AI, with both business leaders who highlighted the importance of open platforms for innovation.
Meta has quickly established itself as a leader in AI, using it across its ecosystem, most notably with Meta AI, deployed on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and promoting open source AI in the industry.as demonstrated by the recent release of Llama 3.1. This open source model represents a significant investment in training time and resources. The largest version of Llama boasts 405 billion parameters and was trained on over 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Zuckerberg explained that increasing the size and generality of models improves the quality of content, envisioning a future where Facebook or Instagram could be run by a single AI model that unifies different types of content and systems.One of the factors that improves quality is that we used to have different templates for each type of content,” Zuckerberg explained. “Now, with larger and more general models, the situation is getting better and better..”
Both CEOs shared their visions of what the future holds. Zuckerberg expressed optimism about combining AI with the real world through smart glasses, noting his company’s partnership with eyewear maker Luxottica. Huang instead emphasized how interaction with AI will become increasingly fluid, going beyond simple text interactions.
“Today’s AI is like a turn-based game. You say something, and the AI responds,” Huang said. “In the future, AI could consider multiple options or create a series of possibilities and simulate the results, making it much more powerful.”
