NVIDIA, a pioneer in accelerated computing, is more than a company manufacturing GPUs, explains Vishal Dhupar, MD, Asia-South, NVIDIA Graphics Pvt Ltd. In an exclusive interaction with The Hindu, he talks about the company’s upcoming Spring GTC, the use cases for AR and VR, and more.
Edited excerpts:
What is NVIDIA’s focus right now and what are its main growth areas?
Vishal Dhupar: The focus of NVIDIA is to make virtual worlds look like the real world. With generative AI, enabled by accelerated computing, being the hottest topic of discussion, NVIDIA has been working on creating computing platforms that enable this growth.
We love solving hard problems and have dedicated our entire life to it. We have created solutions that impact society. NVIDIA sits at the intersection of computer graphics, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence.
How do you see the growth of AI and virtual reality and what you do think will be their most important use cases?
VD: When we enter the virtual world, we tend to stay longer if it feels more realistic, else we reject it and right from the beginning, our pursuit has been to solve that problem through programmable shaders.
Looking at use cases, AI is a big boon to industrial 4.0 and gives the flexibility of generating new content in text and video, and auto-writing codes. And with multiple new models, which are large, and which are foundational, you can now mix-match and build things that involve collaboration within different aspects of manufacturing and simulation.
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How do you see AI impacting the lives of people?
VD: In India, people are very fond of selfies and short videos, and they want to display what’s happening. But if you add richness to it, you can build a much bigger community around it and then you can turn into an influencer and monetize it.
Creation and richness of content is a big thing. I think it’s going to have a positive impact, specifically when you take your own digital experience and your own data and apply it, what will be built will be unique to you.
What are some of the focus areas other than AI for NVIDIA?
VD: NVIDIA is a computing platform company. You can build specialised solutions where you take semiconductors, the chip, or the processor and leverage the architecture through tools and libraries, which are created for the specific need.
For example, if you want to create the engine of any company, which is a recommendation, how will you do it? You will have pre-trained data, and algorithms into models already done.
NVIDIA gives you flexibility. It gives you the ability to engage in different steps you can engage as purely at the chip levels. If you know that you want the flexibility to use your own tools, you can take advantage of the chipset along with our toolset and accelerate your work.
What is the importance of India for NVIDIA as a company?
VD: I’m truly excited about India. India has ramped up to get innovations that can conquer some of the daunting challenges that we have in agriculture, healthcare, mobility education, and many more use cases. We have seen that many think tanks have leapt onto the scene. They are basically attracting the attention of researchers that try to utilise indigenous AI to leverage AI for India.
So, the infrastructure needs to be accelerated for deployment. But we are on the right path. The second, is really the India stack which is all about population, scale ,and small transactions.
So, with the infrastructure, India has the perfect combination to bring in new companies, change the way we operate and more importantly solve many of the societal challenges.
What is the GTC and what is its importance for the developer community?
VD: There are six corridors and one of the corridors is about how to build trust-based models during a period where the previous year brings in more data than the previous hundred years. The GTC is aimed at answering questions like how do I manage data? How do I secure it? How to create cyber defence in a new environment earlier and implement it.
The GTC is an opportunity for millions of developers. And in India, which has over half a million stem students to really go and see what impact they can make to society.
Published - March 17, 2023 04:45 pm IST
