CREDIT TK WHY AI MATTERS IN CONVERSATION WITH JENSEN HUANG AND PRESIDENT JAYATHI MURTHY. KARL MAASDAM, ’93 JENSEN HUANG,’84, has played a pivotal role in the development of AI as the founder and CEO of NVIDIA. The Santa Clara, California-based company, launched in 1993, was valued this March at roughly $2.93 trillion, placing it in the running with companies like Apple and Microsoft for the world’s largest market capitalization. Huang’s vision and leadership transformed NVIDIA from a graphics card company into an AI powerhouse that provides the essential tools and technologies that drive the current AI revolution. The company’s graphics processing units (GPUs) — initially designed for gaming — have proven exceptionally well suited for the parallel processing demands of deep learning algorithms, and make it possible to quickly train large language models and analyze enormous datasets related to genomics, healthcare and climate science, among other fields. Huang recognized this potential early on. Soon, the company became a leader in AI, helping transform industries. Huang and his wife, Lori Mills Huang, ’85, first met as engineering lab partners at Oregon State. Married in 1985, the couple have been faithful supporters of the university and its mission ever since. In 2022, they contributed $25 million toward construction of the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex, opening in 2026, and $25 millon toward the supercomputer it will house.This facility is set to become, as OSU President Jayathi Murthy has put it,“the symbolic heart of AI at the university.” 3. ONE OF THE BIGGEST NAMES IN AI IS AN OREGON STATE ALUMNUS. In the spring of 2024, Oregon State’s first Global Futures Forum on artificial intelligence explored the technology’s potential economic, scientific and creative impacts on the university and the world. Here’s an excerpt from a panel discussion with OSU President Jayathi Murthy and alumnus and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, moderated by Provost Ed Feser. FESER: My first question to Jensen and then President Murthy is “so what” about AI? HUANG: Let me take a step back first and explain why NVIDIA is at the center of the AI revolution. ¶ We started the company 31 years ago to pioneer a new way of doing computing. Our observation was that in many important applications — it could be scientific, it could be computer graphics, it could be artificial intelligence or robotics — 5% of the code consumes 99.9% of the time to run. And if that’s the case, why would we compute using a general- purpose computer that does everything the same way? It’s not really sensible. ¶ So we invented a programming model called CUDA that has effectively driven down the cost of computing over the past decade or so by a million times. Just do that thought experiment: If the cost of doing something — weather simulations, molecular dynamics simulations — goes down by a million times, how would that change what you do? And it turns out because computers are such a foundational part of almost everything we do, and the compu- ter is such an important instrument in nearly every field of science, this changed everything. ¶ For example, look at a few sample data points. Make an observation and apply the scien- tificmethod.Writesome software to process that data and try to
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==