Huang's remarks were delivered in this week's earnings call for fiscal Q4 of 2023. The company ended up beating expectations and saw strong earnings in its data center products. As expected, there was plenty of discussion about Nvidia's AI products. When it came to the Q/A portion, though, Jensen went off on an extended tear about ChatGPT's future. In the transcript(Opens in a new window) saved by PC Gamer(Opens in a new window), Huang said ChatGPT caught everyone by surprise with one simple trick: its ability to "perform tasks and skills that it was never trained to do."
By that, Huang means it can essentially translate human language into computer code. "It can be prompted in human language, but output Python, output Cobalt, a language that very few people even remember, output Python for Blender, a 3D program," he said. "So it's a program that writes a program for another program."
Nvidia is already seen as a front-runner in the new "AI arms race." (Credit: Nvidia)
Programs writing programs is certainly an interesting idea and makes us consider when humans can be removed from the equation altogether. Huang explained that in this scenario, human language is the new programming language. "We now realize -- the world now realizes that maybe human language is a perfectly good computer programming language," he said. With large language model AIs, he thinks it will allow anyone to write code. "We've democratized computer programming for everyone, almost anyone who could explain in human language a particular task to be performed."
He concluded his remarks by saying this "new era of computing" will be "utterly revolutionary" for the entire world. "Everybody who develops software is either alerted or shocked into alert or actively working on something that is like ChatGPT to be integrated into their application or integrated into their service," he said, noting this demand is global. Huang says the level of activity surrounding its own AI products has "gone through the roof" in the past 60 days.
Nvidia's CEO could be onto something here. Just recently, an AI already helped with 100 semiconductor designs. Google is also building an AI to code, and it's doing a decent job, too. Jensen has also likened ChatGPT to the iPhone in its ability to show non-tech-savvy folks what AI can accomplish. However, it's yet to be demonstrated that ChatGPT or a competitor can spit out code when prompted by a human without an engineering background. If that does come to pass, it could begin to make a lot of software engineers pretty nervous. Still, a human will be needed to deliver the prompts, so that should give them some job security.
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