In a fireside chat at SIGGRAPH 2024, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang and Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared their insights on the potential of open source AI and virtual assistants.
The conversation began with Zuckerberg announcing the launch of AI Studio, a new platform designed to democratise AI creation. This tool allows users to create, share, and discover AI characters, potentially opening up AI development to millions of creators and small businesses.
Huang emphasised the ubiquity of AI in the future, stating, “Every single restaurant, every single website will probably, in the future, have these AIs …”
Zuckerberg concurred, adding, “…just like every business has an email address and a website and a social media account, I think, in the future, every business is going to have an AI.”
This vision aligns with NVIDIA’s recent developments showcased at SIGGRAPH. The company previewed “James,” an interactive digital human based on the NVIDIA ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) reference design. James – a virtual assistant capable of providing contextually accurate responses – demonstrates the potential for businesses to create custom, hyperrealistic avatars for customer interactions.
The discussion highlighted Meta’s significant contributions to AI development. Huang praised Meta’s work, saying, “You guys have done amazing AI work,” and cited advancements in computer vision, language models, and real-time translation. He also acknowledged the widespread use of PyTorch, an open-source machine learning framework developed by Meta.
Both CEOs stressed the importance of open source in advancing AI. Meta has positioned itself as a leader in this field, implementing AI across its platforms and releasing open-source models like Llama 3.1. This latest model, with 405 billion parameters, required training on over 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, representing a substantial investment in resources.
Zuckerberg shared his vision for more integrated AI models, saying, “I kind of dream of one day like you can almost imagine all of Facebook or Instagram being like a single AI model that has unified all these different content types and systems together.” He believes that collaboration is crucial for further advancements in AI.
The conversation touched on the potential of AI to enhance human productivity. Huang described a future where AI could generate images in real-time as users type, allowing for fluid collaboration between humans and AI assistants. This concept is reflected in NVIDIA’s latest advancements to the NVIDIA Maxine AI platform, including Maxine 3D and Audio2Face-2D, which aim to create immersive telepresence experiences.
Looking ahead, Zuckerberg expressed enthusiasm about combining AI with augmented reality eyewear, mentioning Meta’s collaboration with eyewear maker Luxottica. He envisions this technology transforming education, entertainment, and work.
Huang discussed the evolution of AI interactions, moving beyond turn-based conversations to more complex, multi-option simulations. “Today’s AI is kind of turn-based. You say something, it says something back to you,” Huang explained. “In the future, AI could contemplate multiple options, or come up with a tree of options and simulate outcomes, making it much more powerful.”
The importance of this evolution is evident in the adoption of NVIDIA’s technologies by companies across industries. HTC, Looking Glass, Reply, and UneeQ are among the latest firms using NVIDIA ACE and Maxine for applications ranging from customer service agents to telepresence experiences in entertainment, retail, and hospitality.
As AI continues to evolve and integrate into various aspects of our lives, the insights shared by these industry leaders provide a glimpse into a future where AI assistants are as commonplace as websites and social media accounts.
The developments showcased at SIGGRAPH 2024 by both NVIDIA and other companies demonstrate that this future is rapidly approaching, with digital humans becoming increasingly sophisticated and capable of natural, engaging interactions.
See also: Amazon strives to outpace Nvidia with cheaper, faster AI chips
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