Jensen Huang: What Quality Will Help You Succeed in the Age of AI? (Transcript)

So we built several models, Kazakh large language models based on open source, open weight foundation models.

So at what point it makes sense or it’s worthwhile to build the, our own foundation model from scratch? Or does it really make sense at all?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:08:01 – 00:10:42): I think it makes complete sense, and in fact, I believe it to be a national security concern. And let me tell you why. Intelligence is foundational. Intelligence is general purpose. Intelligence affects every single citizen, every single company, every single country. A country’s intelligence is produced from its data.

And as we mentioned earlier, your country’s data is your natural resource. It belongs to you. You cannot export something as fundamental as your people’s culture and values and export that to import the intelligence from someone else. It makes no sense. It is— so you want to control your own data. You want to control your natural resource. You also want to control the delivery of the service to your people.

Just as you have Kazakhtelecom, you have your own electric grid. In the future, you will have your own electric grid, your own internet, your own telecommunications and your own intelligence grid. It makes no sense for the intelligence grid, which comes from— which powers every part of your country, to be delivered from another country. It is okay to have another country and company supplement, but it cannot be completely And so you have to have some ability to deliver the basic infrastructure services for your own country.

The creation of a Kazakh LLM, KazLLM, is sensible because the invention of the technology is difficult, but the application, the adaptation of the technology is not so difficult. It’s of course not easy, but Kazakhstan has a wealth of science and technology and mathematicians, and you have so many programmers. The developers here are rich. You’re rich with expertise here.

So you should be able to take open source technology, open model technology, apply it to your language, apply it to your culture so that you can run and operate the infrastructure of intelligence yourself here.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:10:43 – 00:11:02): Yeah, we also believe that open source allows us to be sovereign and use it on-premise with the sensitive data. And we have our own— we built our own tokenizer, collected tokens. We know how to train, to fine-tune. So this talent development and human capital development is quite important.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:11:02 – 00:11:04): And I saw so many today already.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:11:04 – 00:11:04): Yes.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:11:05 – 00:11:05): Yes, exactly.

Physical AI: The Next Wave

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:11:05 – 00:12:27): And you’ve seen, by the way, so many startups are here. Yeah. And you’ve seen some of them are in the physical AI space. So let’s talk a little bit about this physical AI, as you call it. It’s a next wave. People got used to feel AI through the screens, on the screens, on their laptops, computers, smartphones. But now with the next wave, It’s moving into the physical AI and where the robots and other hardware systems interact with each other and work together.

So Kazakhstan is rich on heavy industries. So we have factories, mines, transport, agriculture, transport and logistics infrastructure. And of course, talented people with the deep expertise in those industries.

And, so how— what should Kazakhstan do in order to become a hub, or a hub for training the robots? You’ve seen some initial work already, so our specialists know how to train the robots, how to train the models and work with them. So what do you think Kazakhstan can do to become a hub and maybe one of the main partners for NVIDIA to train the models for physical AI.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:12:27 – 00:14:55): It’s a fantastic idea, and I think it’s also an imperative for you to do so. You want Kazakhstan to be an AI nation. AI starts with cognitive AI, cognitive intelligence, soft intelligence, but AI includes everything all the way to physical AI. Physical AI is the largest industry of all, of course, because most of the world includes interaction and understanding of the physical world.

You also have very important application here yourself— mining and natural resources and agriculture. All of the— your own indigenous industries today would benefit from the next phase with physical AI.

Now, physical AI is not just robotics. Robotics is going to be very important. But physical AI includes everything from seismic understanding to mapping mines and wells to understanding geography and geology, where to mine, how best to mine, understanding material science, the processing of chemicals. All of that is going to be part of physical AI.

And AI will be able to tremendously transform each one of those fields, from the mining of the processing of the minerals to the transformation of the minerals into new materials. In every single stage of that will benefit from physical AI.

Now we’re at the beginning of the physical AI journey. This is the next wave. And so everybody is in the beginning. This is a great opportunity for you to participate, to help shape this future industry. In the future, just as we will have artificial general intelligence for cognitive intelligence, cognitive AI, we will have artificial general robotics.

And I saw some today. QazBot was an example of art, the beginnings of artificial general robotics. And I have great hopes and ambition that this will be a very large industry. And we’re delighted to partner with the robotics company here. I was so happy to see NVIDIA is already working with all of them. And so it’s great to see.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:14:56 – 00:14:58): And we’ll try to produce artificial general engineers.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:14:59 – 00:15:10): That’s right. Artificial general farmers. Artificial general miners, artificial general scientists, every single field. Great.

Will AI Help or Replace Jobs? The Power of Ambition

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:15:11 – 00:15:45): One of the main questions that concerns people, even sitting around us, is their jobs and how AI will convert their working lives. So everyone is curious about whether AI will help make their jobs better or will lead for them to left behind. So what do you think, what should people care about and use their energy for developing them in 5, maybe next 5 years?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:15:48 – 00:17:30): The only thing that matters is do you have ambition? If you have ambition, then AI and robotics will lift you. It will empower you to do more. If you were a farmer and you have ambition, the robots will help you farm. But because you have ambition, you can expand your operation. You can expand your horizon. You can expand your business.

If you are a scientist and you have ambition, then your AI assistant will expand the universe that you can explore. If you are an engineer and you have ambition, then your AI engineer will allow you to explore better designs. And so the question is simply, do you have ambition?

If you have ambition, and I believe you do— this is the first country that I’ve been to where the president declared the country to be an AI nation. In that case, AI will lift your nation. AI will lift your people. AI will expand your company so that you can compete and expand globally. AI will transform your society. That’s how I would think about AI.

AI in Education: Raising Better Thinkers

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:17:32 – 00:17:56): Ambition and the talent and creativity should be taken through the— since the childhood. So you’ve seen all these kids today, the TUMO program that spans from 12 to 18 years old. You’ve seen the Tomorrow School in partnership with the École 42, the peer-to-peer education, which is the 18+. And we—

JENSEN HUANG: (00:17:56 – 00:17:59): those are all people with ambition. Yes, children with ambition.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:18:00 – 00:18:25): Yeah. So we embed AI into education, into schools, universities, and the concern that people expressing right now, how do we make sure that AI helps children to become better thinkers rather than just relying purely on AI and to make it harmful for them?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:18:27 – 00:20:01): Again, the question is whether that child has ambition and aspiration. If the child wants to learn more, AI will help them learn more. If the child wants to do less, then the AI, of course, can help them do less. And so it is our job as parents to imbue our children, instill our children with hope, ambition, aspiration. To help them dream bigger. And when you dream big, then AI will lift you to achieve that.

Same exact idea for children as well as for adults, for companies as well as countries and nations. If you have aspiration, if you have ambition, and it requires the leadership to instill ambition, Just as President Tokayev instilled ambition for the nation to be an AI nation. That’s ambition.

All the companies that I’ve met so far, you have ambition to be great, you have ambition to be global, you have ambition to be international. That ambition will be powered by AI. And so the most important thing we need to do as country leaders like yourself as CEOs like myself and my friends, as parents, is to instill upon our people, our families, our companies, our nation, instill upon them ambition.

Why NVIDIA Invested in Higgsfield AI

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:20:02 – 00:21:38): Let me give you a real example of ambition then. So we have, we talk about this youth ambition and the real case of ambition. So let me turn to our AI unicorn, Higgsfield AI. So I think this is the greatest example of ambition of young people. It’s our first AI unicorn. The average age of the team is 25.

And by the way, we have main co-founders here with us today. And we have Alex Mashrabov and Yerzat Dulat along with their broader team here. So please stand, guys. Yeah. The company is valued at the multi-billion valuation right now.

And I have a good update, good news for the people around us and those watching online. NVIDIA has invested into Higgsfield AI. Just a few words about Higgsfield AI. So what really made NVIDIA to decide in order to invest into Higgsfield? So just for the other followers to be— what should be a northern star for them in order to be compliant to the investment decisions as yourselves?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:21:38 – 00:22:50): Well, the first thing is this. The first thing and the last thing is you invest in people, not companies. And the founders of Higgsfield are visionary in the work that they do. They had a wonderful idea. It’s not easy to do. It requires— and they have global competitors. Many of them are in San Francisco, in the United States. Incredibly well-funded and formidable expertise.

But these are some of the brightest people in the world. They have 600 people here in Kazakhstan and you have an average age of 25 years old. Many of them are deep tech engineers and deep tech computer scientists already with offices here in Kazakhstan. And in United States, you’re able to bridge the culture and the expertise from 2 different nations and they’re competing globally.

And so, when you’re investing in a company, you’re really investing in people. And so you have to select the best people.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:22:51 – 00:23:02): I’ve been to their offices once. They start their work at 5 PM. They’re sitting, they’re looking for a new office. They’re expanding. They used to be 150 people.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:23:03 – 00:23:08): You start at 5 PM? I want my money back.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:23:11 – 00:23:12): But they work overnight.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:23:13 – 00:23:17): I start at 5 AM. Today I start at 4 AM.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:23:23 – 00:23:33): Yeah, so they’re expanding right now, looking for an office, 20,000 square meter office. And it’s a great ecosystem. So talented engineers.

Kazakhstan as an AI Computing Hub for Europe

JENSEN HUANG: (00:23:33 – 00:23:48): Well, Kazakhstan has a lot of real estate. It also has a lot of energy. And the DC Valley has 1 gigawatt planned. And so you’re going to have a lot of compute right here in Kazakhstan.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:23:48 – 00:23:48): Right.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:23:49 – 00:24:10): And so it’s going to be a hub, a computing hub, an AI factory hub for all of Europe. The telecommunications interconnection that you created, completely visionary. Now it put Kazakhstan right in the middle of the European AI ecosystem, and then you could feel the AI economy throughout. Fantastic.

AI Safety and NVIDIA OpenShell

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:24:12 – 00:24:51): Let’s talk a little bit about the security issues. So we see quite recent news on some security hacks, jailbreaks, and so on. Does NVIDIA plan to develop a technology that’s embedded into the hardware whenever there are models got hacked or something happening wrong with the models? Will there be a technology on the hardware, on the hardware of NVIDIA that helps to mitigate those risks?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:24:52 – 00:26:42): Well, in order for us to enjoy, for the world to enjoy the positive benefits and the incredible opportunities that will be created by AI, we have to develop it and advance it and deploy it responsibly. Just as when we’re building self-driving cars, safety is vital from the very beginning. Just as when you’re mining and you want to have a mining industry, safety is vital from the very beginning.

And so if we want society to benefit from AI, it is important and it’s the responsibility of the creators, the creators like NVIDIA, creators like Higgsfield, that we advance this technology in a responsible way. The technology to keep AI safe is foundational technology as well. The technology has to be invented. The technology has to be engineered.

We created a technology called OpenShell. OpenShell contains this autonomous system. These agents are essentially self-driving cars or robots inside a computer. And if you give them access to files and access to tools, they will freely go about to access the files to do their job.

And so we have to contain them to make sure that whatever access is exactly the access we want it to have, whatever privileges are limited to what it needs to— it needs in order to do its job, and we need to monitor it at all times. And so the technology for deploying, for even creating the AI safely is called OpenShell. And I advise everybody to use it.

A Year of Breakthroughs in Agentic AI

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:26:45 – 00:27:00): Yeah, definitely. There are lots of new ideas that are coming up, especially in this fast-changing environment. Has there been any particular situation where you changed your mind about AI in the past year?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:27:03 – 00:28:08): No, I’m more enthusiastic today about AI than I was a year ago, and I was very enthusiastic a year ago. The big breakthroughs in AI this last year, especially with agentic systems, we’ve made AI useful now.

In fact, if you look at the Higgsfield-generated videos, in just one year’s time, It has improved tremendously. In the beginning, Higgsfield was able to generate short videos. Now you can generate very long videos that are temporally and physically consistent. It tells a story for a very long period of time. It’s not possible without agentic reasoning systems.

And so the technology has become very useful. In video generation, of course, word generation and software coding and robotic systems and drug discovery. In so many different fields, these systems have become very, very useful.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:28:10 – 00:28:39): And we haven’t mentioned you and we didn’t have a chance to present you that a month ago we were running the first AI Film Festival. So which, it’s a contest with more than 8,000 applications, videos submitted of more than 100,000 minutes in total with the more than 120 countries participated with the $2 million prize and—

JENSEN HUANG: (00:28:39 – 00:28:40): With how much?

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:28:40 – 00:28:49): $2 million prize pool. Wow. And for the jury, it was very difficult to determine which video is better.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:28:50 – 00:28:57): Kazakhstan is going to be the home of the Cannes Festival of AI films.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:28:58 – 00:29:04): It’s a decentralization of Hollywood.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:29:04 – 00:29:07): Okay. Yeah, that’s terrific.

What Jensen Huang Would Learn If He Were 18 Today

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:29:08 – 00:29:24): So for the sake of time, yeah, we have to wrap it up. And just the final one. I have a question from the audience here. And so if you were 18 years old and living in Kazakhstan today, what would you spend the next 5 years learning and building?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:29:26 – 00:31:03): Well, I envy being 18 years old today. And the reason for that is because the world is changing so rapidly. And there’s a complete reset because of technology.

When I was— I was fortunate because when I was 18 years old, the personal computer was just becoming possible. And my generation was— I’ve been working for 43 years. My generation was defined by the creation of the computer. And all of our 4 decades of endeavors has led to now artificial intelligence, which is a complete reset of everything that we’ve done.

Instead of programming the computer, you have to learn how to program AI. And so that young man here in Kazakhstan You’re 18 years old. AI is now new for you. It’s new for everybody else. I would dedicate myself to be the world’s best programmer of AI.

AI has the ability to automate. It has the ability to partner with us, has ability to assist us. But just as you partner with some human, you, and you have assistance from somebody, you have to learn how to interact. You have to learn how to program each other.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:31:04 – 00:31:09): Do they have to learn technical skills or just social sciences in order to do better prompting?

JENSEN HUANG: (00:31:10 – 00:32:05): You need both. You need to understand the best programmer of AI is someone who understands how AI works. The best user of a machine is someone who understands how the machine works. The best driver of a race car is someone who understands how the car works.

And so the best programmer of AI should understand how the machinery of AI works, what its fundamental principles are, what its strengths are, weaknesses are, how it’s developing, where it will be in the future. And so all of these properties about the technology must be understood if you want to harness the capability of AI to the fullest.

And so you have a lot of technical reasons to engage AI, and you have extraordinary potential when you learn how to program AI, how to use AI.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:32:07 – 00:32:14): And probably you’ve seen that the children and the youth that we have here at alem.ai, they’re probably on the right track.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:32:14 – 00:32:17): Well, they were upstairs already using AI, programming AI.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:32:18 – 00:32:34): Yeah. Well, thank you, Jensen. So it was such a pleasure to have you here on the fireside chat. It’s your first visit to Kazakhstan and hope not the last one. And we look forward to expanding our partnership with NVIDIA. Well, thank you. Let’s get a round of applause to Jensen.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:32:34 – 00:32:37): Thank you.

A Kazakh Tradition: The Shapan

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:32:42 – 00:32:54): And we have Thank you. And we have a small Kazakh tradition to our respected guests. We usually give our present, which is called “shapan.”

JENSEN HUANG: (00:32:54 – 00:32:57): Oh, wow.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:33:01 – 00:33:06): For you to feel like a king of AI. Wow.

JENSEN HUANG: (00:33:09 – 00:33:21): Yeah, this is the Kazakh traditional robe of honor given to our most esteemed guests. So yes, thank you. Wear it with joy. It fits you very well.

ZHASLAN MADIYEV: (00:33:22 – 00:33:23): Thank you.

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