Nvidia chief Jensen Huang took a dig this week at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s plan to raise as much as $7 trillion to ‘reshape’ the global AI chip industry, saying the answer lay in technology and not money.
“You can’t assume just that you will buy more computers. You have to also assume that the computers are going to become faster and therefore the total amount that you need is not going to be as much,” Huang said at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
“If you just assume that computers never get any faster, you might come to the conclusion we need 14 different planets and three different galaxies and, you know, four more Suns to fuel all this,” he quipped.
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The irony of Huang’s conversation with UAE’s Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Al Olama was that the United Arab Emirates government was reportedly one of the investors that the Open AI chief had approached for the $7 trillion funding.
And, of course, the bid for a new chip venture was aimed at reducing OpenAI’s dependence on Nvidia for its cutting-edge artificial intelligence chips (which have been selling for up to and over $40,000 each).
It is also a strong factor in the latest surge in prices of Nvidia and other chip-related companies stock.
Altman’s plan was a major, if not the biggest, driver of the discussion titled “Who Will Shape the Future of AI?”
Al Olama began the conversation asking: “How many GPUs can we buy for $7 trillion?”
“Well, apparently, all the GPUs,” Huang responded with a chuckle.
The Nvidia chief said he believed only rigorous progress in technology — accelerated computing — would ensure sustainable, energy efficient, high performance and cost-effective computing.
“Whatever demand that you think is going to power the the world, you have to consider the fact that it is also going to do it one million times larger, faster [and] more efficiently.”
- Vishakha Saxena
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