By Prakash Narayan–
(Prakash Narayan is chief technology officer at 3K Technologies)
IIT Bay Area’s Leadership Conference on September 16, 2023 at the Santa Clara Convention Center embraced the principles of Resilience and Reinvention.
As we are collectively facing the aftermath of the Pandemic-induced “Great Reset”, along with stubborn inflation, the ongoing war in Russia, a decline in GDP, and a deterioration of startup valuations, the conference equipped the attendees with the tools and ideas necessary to navigate through these turbulent times with knowledge, determination and strength.
The conference got off to a rousing start with the opening keynote by Jensen Huang, President of NVIDIA. Jensen was joined on stage by a rock star team of NVIDIA execs (all IIT Alumni) — Raj Rajagopalan, VP of Go To Market; Vivek Singh, VP of Advanced Technology Group — with responsibility for Computational Lithography; Sameer Halepete, VP of VLSI Engineering.
Jensen Huang mesmerized the audience by recalling the early beginning of NVIDIA — where he placed 2 big bets: Accelerated Computing and AI.
The fundamental principle that general purpose computing needs to be augmented by accelerated computing (by adding a parallel processor next to the CPU) has served NVIDIA well since its inception.
He envisions a world where anything with structure can be understood and composed by computing. At this time, Natural Language processing (which is structured) is largely tackled. There is structure in the physical world.
So, it should be possible to use deep learning to learn the language of climate, represent proteins, design enzymes that can eat plastic and carbon — thus mitigating the effects of global warming.
He believes that it should be possible to use digital technologies to revolutionize the world’s largest industries.
For example, buildings and factories are not efficiently designed. They are either over engineered (thus making them too expensive to build) or under engineered (thus making them prone to getting impacted under extreme conditions).
Jensen also talked about his recent meetings with Prime Minister Modi. He admired Modi’s bold stance of not exporting grain and export bread, instead. He also met with Nandan Nilekani and N Chandrasekaran (Chairman, Tata Group).
He admitted that the problems that they are solving in IT is much harder than AI. He predicted that India is going to be one of the largest AI markets in the world.
Jensen advised the audience to find problems that are hard for everyone and surround yourself with good people to try and solve those problems. He further advised that while there are hardships to overcome in reaching a goal, always remember the learnings and forget the pain and suffering.
When asked if he sees jobs being lost to AI, he responded, “We will not lose jobs to AI, we will lose our jobs to someone who uses AI.
Certainly, Jensen was right when the closing keynote speaker Prof. Jitendra Malik, UC Berkeley and Former head of AI Research at Meta talked on the topic of “When will we have Intelligent Robots”.
Dr. Malik said that what took 550 million years to develop is harder to replicate by AI / robots. So, while AI can perform complex tasks of supply chain automation; image / video recognition — including self-driving cars, AI cannot perform simple tasks that require dexterity and hand-eye coordination.
This is referred to as Moravec’s paradox which states that it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.
Dr. Malik showed some impressive videos of legged robots with the ability to adapt to unfamiliar terrain like sand, mud, grass and dirt.
More conference articles covered by indica can be read at the site https://iitbaycon.org.
