Sharing with the VinFuture Foundation right after receiving the VinFuture 2024 Main Prize, Mr. Jensen Huang, co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, said he was “very moved and honored” to receive the award on behalf of his colleagues. “Vietnam has initiated a meaningful award with the same stature as the Nobel Prize to honor breakthrough scientific achievements and connect with global scientists,” he said.
“For more than 30 years, Nvidia has built tools to help scientists, artists and creators push the boundaries of what is possible,” he said. “Vietnam, with its dynamic workforce and growing technology ecosystem, is poised to become an AI powerhouse,” he said. Nvidia is proud to support this journey by driving innovation and nurturing talent.
He also explained the decision to choose Vietnam as Nvidia’s “second home”, because this country “possesses many advantages, of which the greatest “superpower” is family values and respect for children. Vietnamese people have excellent achievements in STEM fields, especially Mathematics and Science. This helps Vietnam become the world’s second largest supplier of software engineers – a fact very few people know about it,” he said.
Huang said he wants to attract excellent software engineers, researchers and AI engineers from Vietnam. At the same time, “wants to promote a complete AI ecosystem with three core elements: advanced AI infrastructure, strong AI training programs at universities, and the development of AI startups “.
According to him, when these three elements are fully built, the “flywheel” of innovation will spin strongly, bringing great value not only to Vietnam but also to the entire region.
Previously, on December 5, Vietnam and Nvidia signed an agreement to open an R&D Center and AI Data Center to promote the application of artificial intelligence and expand jobs for domestic human resources.
The Vietnam Research and Development Center (VRDC) and AI Data Center are expected to be the foundation to help Nvidia and domestic partners deploy advanced AI.
The agreement is the result of more than a year of work between the two sides, starting with Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh’s visit to Nvidia headquarters in the US in September 2023.
During the signing ceremony on the afternoon of December 5 in Hanoi, the Prime Minister assessed that the cooperation taking place after just over a year is an important milestone, demonstrating Mr. Huang’s strong determination and commitment to turning Vietnam into “Nvidia’s second home” with the spirit of “once said, done, committed to deliver, done, delivered must bring specific results”.
Mr. Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, spoke after receiving the award. Image: Ngoc Thanh
At the 2024 VinFuture Award, Mr. Huang along with four other scientists including Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey E. Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Fei-Fei Li for their groundbreaking contributions to promoting the advancement of deep learning received the award. main, worth 3 million USD. In which, Mr. Huang, as a co-founder of Nvidia, is recognized for his strategic leadership role, developing the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) platform to help program GPUs. to efficiently handle the huge computational requirements of deep learning.
He recognizes that AI truly brings superior power, but it does not completely replace humans. AI can take care of about 80% of the tasks in a job, but not all of them. The reason is very simple: there are elements that AI can never have, such as empathy, kindness or desire – the core things that create human value. Therefore, instead of worrying that AI will “steal” our jobs, we should focus on learning how to use AI to increase labor productivity. The reality is: “AI won’t take your job, but someone else who knows how to leverage AI can do it,” Huang said.
Jensen Huang was born in 1963 and currently owns a fortune of more than 126 billion USD, most of which comes from shares in Nvidia, the number one AI chip company in the world today. He co-founded the company in 1993 with initial products aimed at supporting graphics processing and games. Since AI exploded in 2022, Nvidia has continuously competed for the most valuable position on the planet with Apple.