Nvidia CEO Renxun Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg rarely share the same stage for 'business talk'.
On July 29th local time, at the 50th SIGGRAPH graphic conference held in Denver, USA, Huang Renxun and Zuckerberg had their first public Fireside Talk. In this relaxed conversation, the two discussed some of the company's latest developments and shared insights on AI trends. Zuckerberg stated that AI basic research is accelerating, and based on current AI model technology, the industry still has five years of product innovation space.
Before the conversation began, Huang Renxun had already showcased the company's latest products at the conference and announced that "Nvidia will begin sending Blackwell samples this week, which is the company's first new chip architecture this year.
On the same day, Meta also announced the launch of a new tool called AI Studio, built on the company's latest big model Llama 3.1, which allows users to create, share, and design personalized AI chatbots, while allowing Instagram creators to use AI characters as an extension of themselves to handle simple automatic replies.
Zuckerberg stated in the conversation that as information becomes increasingly abundant on social media, how to help users filter content has become a major issue, and generative AI can help improve social media recommendation systems. He believes that in the future, every enterprise will have its own AI assistant (AI Agent) that can independently complete complex tasks that require a long time.
Huang Renxun said that AI, as a chatbot, is currently at the stage of "one question, one answer". In the future, AI may be able to generate decision tree like thinking for users: "When we are given a task or a question, you know we will consider multiple options, or conceptualize a decision tree and follow it down, simulate it in our minds, and see the different outcomes of each decision. AI may do the same thing in the future, which makes me super excited
When Huang Renxun began to praise Meta's latest open source model Llama 3.1, Zuckerberg talked about the impact of Apple's closed system on him, making him realize the importance of the open source ecosystem: "You not only need to build an (AI) software, you need an ecosystem around it. If we don't open source it, it's likely not that useful. We're not doing this because we're altruists, although I think it will indeed help the ecosystem - we're doing it because open source will make what we're building the best
Huang Renxun reiterated his optimism about the future development of humanoid robots during the conversation, believing that AI will have a physical world model. Zuckerberg talked about the company's long-term bet on smart glasses, stating that he had always thought holographic AR glasses would appear before the arrival of the AI era, but the former has not been mass-produced until now; However, Zuckerberg still firmly believes that smart glasses will become the mobile version of the next generation computing platform.
Meta is one of Nvidia's main clients. In January of this year, Zuckerberg announced in a high-profile manner that Meta is planning to build its own AGI (General Artificial Intelligence) and aims to acquire approximately 350000 H100 GPUs from Nvidia by the end of this year. Including other GPUs, the total computing power owned by the company will be close to the computing power that 600000 H100 can provide.
In this conversation, Huang Renxun also talked about some interesting things he had with Zuckerberg. He said that before Zuckerberg came to his home as a guest, they prepared a cheese steak sandwich that both of them liked to eat together. When Zuckerberg was chopping tomatoes, Huang Renxun was surprised to find that the other person with OCD had sliced each tomato equally thin and arranged them neatly in a circle on the plate, with the same distance between each piece: "That's why he needs an AI that won't judge him
In addition, when it comes to the days when Nvidia took a detour, Huang Renxun joked that if he had known it would take him so many years to succeed, he would have chosen to drop out of college like Zuckerberg in order to stay ahead.
After the conversation ended, Zuckerberg took out the gift he had prepared for Huang Renxun: a thick black leather jacket. So, the two exchanged jackets again.
At this conference, Nvidia announced a series of software updates. The company has officially released NVIDIA NIM microservices for AI models, which can generate OpenUSD language to answer user queries, generate OpenUSD Python code, apply materials to 3D objects, understand 3D space and physics to help accelerate the development of digital twins, and more.
Nvidia also announced that it will provide a set of services, models, and computing platforms for leading global robot manufacturers, AI model developers, and software manufacturers to develop, train, and build the next generation of humanoid robots. Dozens of enterprises including 1x, Boston Dynamics, ByteDance Research, FieldAl, Figure, Fourier, Galaxy General, and Interworld Dynamics were among the first to join the Nvidia humanoid robot developer program.
On the 29th, Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) closed at $111.59 per share, down 1.30%, with a total market value of $2.75 trillion; Meta (Nasdaq: META) closed at $465.71 per share, with a flat stock price and a total market value of $1.18 trillion.