Had benefit of watching PM Modi talk about AI 10 years ago: Nvidia Chief Executive

Chapel Hill (North Carolina), Sep 2 (AHN) Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has said India must move faster to seize the opportunities offered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), describing the country as one of the world’s leading information technology powers and urging its companies and start-ups to build a domestic AI economy.

“AI is moving fast, so every country has to move faster,” Huang told reporters on the sidelines of the G20 Innovation Ministerial.

Huang said the rise of AI marked the beginning of a new technology platform, creating an opening for India to build on the strength of its established IT industry.

“India is one of the world’s leading IT industries, and this is the beginning of a new IT platform,” Huang told AHN in response to a question.

Huang recalled an early conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the emerging technology.

“And I had the benefit of seeing Modi Ji a decade ago, talking about AI,” Huang told AHN.

“I’m really anxious to see and very excited to see the local companies and the local startups starting in India, starting to take advantage of the technology, contributing to the technology, and then building the local AI economy with it,” Huang added.

The Nvidia chief said AI had become productive economic infrastructure. While the United States intended to lead by building the entire technology stack, he said other countries should be able to select the components they needed to develop their own AI economies.

He said the US administration was supportive of technology development and proud of American companies building within the country. Washington, he added, wanted other G20 countries to adopt the technology and use it to create their own AI economies.

Asked about the rules governing AI and innovation, Huang cautioned against regulations based on risks that had not materialised.

“The rules of the road, right now the technology is in its formative stages,” he said. “The advice that I would have is to regulate practical and actual harm and not regulate theoretical and hypothetical harm.”

Huang said the technology should continue to advance safely. More sophisticated systems, he argued, could become safer, more practical and more useful.

He compared the development of AI with improvements in automobile safety over the past century.

“Just as cars today are much safer because the technology is better than the cars were 100 years ago, we need to make the technology as advanced as possible,” Huang said.

The quality and reliability of AI systems had improved considerably over the past two years, he said. Newer systems were hallucinating less, becoming more grounded in factual information and acquiring a greater ability to solve practical problems.

“We need to keep moving in that direction,” he said.

Huang also placed responsibility on technology companies to ensure that AI was developed safely, even as they competed to build more powerful systems.

“Every single company has to take it upon themselves to develop the technology safely,” he said. “As we race quickly to make the technology better and more useful and safer, we also build it safely.”

Huang said he had not discussed the prospect of additional semiconductor tariffs with the US official at the ministerial.

“I had no conversation related to that,” he said.

Nvidia was founded in 1993 and initially became known for graphics processing units used in computers and gaming. Its chips later emerged as a central component of the computing infrastructure used to train and operate artificial intelligence systems.

Huang co-founded Nvidia and has served as its chief executive since the company’s creation. The company’s rapid growth has made him one of the most prominent industry voices in the international debate over AI infrastructure, regulation and safety.