Two of the biggest names in technology and artificial intelligence see AI becoming more of an everyday helper for small businesses and individuals in coming years, enabling new kinds of products and services.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and NVIDIA Corp.’s Jensen Huang shared a stage Monday afternoon in Denver at SIGGRAPH 2024 — a convention focused on computer graphics, image processing, robotics and interactive techniques. The pair of tech founders exchanged banter and their thoughts before an audience at the Denver Convention Center, covering the future of artificial intelligence and how generative AI technology will impact businesses.
“A lot of the Gen AI stuff is going to, on the one hand, … be this big upgrade for all of the workflows and products that we’ve had for a long time,” Zuckerberg said. “But on the other hand, there’s going to be all these completely new things that can now get created.”
The technology is an “interesting revolution” that will make each of Meta’s products different in interesting ways, said Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Menlo Park, California-based tech giant Meta Platforms Inc. (Nasdaq: META), which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Having an AI assistant for individuals and businesses is the next iteration of AI technology, Zuckerberg and Huang predicted.
SIGGRAPH 2024
Huang teased the concept of digital agents and AI assistants, saying they would augment every single role in a company one day.
Meta is rolling out its AI Studio for U.S. creators to make their own AI chatbots, with no tech skills required. Initial use cases for these chatbots include answering common direct message questions, replying to stories, generating memes, giving travel advice and more, according to the tool’s website.
“Just like every business has an email address and a website and a social media account, or several, I think in the future, every business is going to have an AI agent that communicates with their customers,” Zuckerberg said.
“We want to empower all the people who use our products to basically create agents for themselves, whether that’s all the many, many millions of creators that are on the platform or [the] hundreds of millions of small businesses,” he said. “We eventually want to be able to pull in all your content and very quickly stand up a business agent and be able to interact with your customers, and do sales and customer support and all that.”
But the assistant will go beyond answering questions the way a chatbot does today, Zuckerberg said.
Llama, a large language model released by Meta AI in February 2023, is now in its third iteration. Future versions are expected to go beyond question-and-answer results and instead “spin up compute jobs that take weeks or months,” Zuckerberg said.
“I think that that’s going to be really powerful,” he said.
Huang believes AI assistants will solve problems similar to how humans overcome challenges today. It will contemplate multiple options and walk through each option as a simulation to determine each outcome.
Zuckerberg’s visit to the Mile High City comes weeks after news of Meta downsizing its downtown Denver office. The tech giant will give up nearly half of its office space near Union Station early next year.
It was Zuckerberg’s first SIGGRAPH conference, he said, though he noted Meta has been attending the conference for the last eight years.
SIGGRAPH was founded in Boulder in 1974. Past conferences introduced the world to new technology such as Aspen Movie Map, a precursor to Google Street View, and Pixar’s “Luxo Jr.,” which is said to have redefined animation.
NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA), a Santa Clara-based tech company that makes graphic processing units (GPUs) that have become key for AI, gaming and robotics, introduced 20 papers at the intersection of artificial intelligence and simulation at this year’s SIGGRAPH.
NVIDIA is using AI to conduct large-scale simulations, faster, Huang said. NVIDIA also announced upgrades to its Omniverse software that will take text and convert it into 3D images and framework for building virtual worlds.
