ChatGPT has already enamored countless users with its fascinating ability to generate human-like answers for just about any question that a user might have, and some of the latest to take notice includes NVIDIA’s own leather-jacket-wearing CEO, Jensen Huang. During a speech at Berkeley Haas University, Huang, 59, gave his views on OpenAI’s leading project following an inquiry from a student, expressing his amazement at the technology and going so far as to call it the “iPhone moment of AI,” implying that it’s going to be a real game-changer. Huang’s views on ChatGPT may not be all that surprising however, as its growing popularity has already made the executive $5 billion richer, according to recent reports that point out how investors are increasingly betting on NVIDIA for being an important and hugely relevant vendor for OpenAI.
From a transcript of Jensen Huang’s comments at Berkeley Haas:
First of all, ChatGPT is a very very big deal. Just think about it, in just a few days it has reached tens of millions of people. I think it’s more than 5, probably less than 30 and the amazing thing is this, everyone is using it for different reasons and everyone finds it delightful.
When was the last time we saw a piece of technology that is so versatile that it can solve problems and surprise people in so many ways so often? It can write a poem of course, it could fill out a spreadsheet, it can write a SQL query and do a SQL query, it can write python code, it can write Verilog and so you know you can’t do it today but of course, it will be able to do it someday.
So the fact that you have this tool that can do all these different things is really surprising a lot of people around the world. Now for a lot of people who have been working on this, we have been waiting for this moment. This is the iPhone moment of artificial intelligence. This is the time when all those ideas within mobile computing and all that, it all came together in a product that everyone just kinda, I see it.
I can now use it as an API and connect to a spreadsheet, I connect it to PowerPoint, I connect it to a Drawing program, I connect it to a Photo AI program, it will make everything better. So we now know that this is going to be a monumental impact on technology. And now the question is, how quickly will the technology diffuse? I think in the last 60 days, it kinda tells us something that the rate of technology diffusion can be quite high. For example, since ChatGPT came out probably some 500 startups have already happened, and not only that, in about 2 weeks’ time they could make applications that are really delightful and useful.
This is no different than when browsers were created and somebody overnight created Javascript and you got a website that was quite surprising. Or when the iPhone came out and somebody wrote something and took about a couple of weekends and they have a piece of software that they can download from the app store. Before you know it, its something like Spotify. You know that’s pretty amazing. This is going to happen now!
For the last 40 years, we have made computers harder and harder for people to program and that’s why the technology divide has been so large and the technology divide is getting larger and larger except till one day, all of a sudden, everyone can program a computer. You just have to prompt this thing to write a program for you, do something for you, automate something for you.
What OpenAI has done what the team over there has done, genuinely, one of the greatest things that has ever been done for computing. We have democratized computing in a very very large way, and so I am very excited about that.