Billionaire Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA Corporation, who is not from an academic background, surprised many by being one of the five scientists awarded the prestigious 3 million USD VinFuture Grand Prize this year.
On the evening of December 6, the VinFuture Grand Prize 2024 worth 3 million USD announced the names of five individuals: Professor Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal, Canada), Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton (Vector Institute, Canada), Mr. Jensen Huang (NVIDIA Corporation, USA), Professor Yann LeCun (New York University, USA), and Professor Fei-Fei Li (Stanford University, USA) for their groundbreaking contributions to advancing deep learning.
Professor Monica Lam (Stanford University, USA), who directly nominated the NVIDIA CEO, also noted that her nomination was “a bit different from the usual.” She stated that nominating hardware experts is a way to acknowledge the exceptional contributions of the technology sector. The Nobel Prize has recognized AI researchers, but the widespread impact of AI could not have been achieved without hardware.
According to Professor Lam, the commercial success of entrepreneur Jensen Huang is a clear testament to the importance of applying science in practice.
“VinFuture is renowned for its fair recognition of all, not just outstanding individuals, which is why I nominated the CEO of NVIDIA,” Professor Lam revealed.
Billionaire Jensen Huang delivers a speech upon receiving the VinFuture Grand Prize 2024 at Ho Guom Theater on the evening of December 6.
Meanwhile, Professor Richard Henry Friend, Chairman of the VinFuture Prize Council, pointed out a “peculiarity” that has emerged in the past 50 years. This is the increasing separation between those working in industry and those who are solely focused on research. According to him, the world must connect both to operate effectively.
This is also a rare occasion where a representative from the industry has been honored at an international science and technology award, which is often seen as the pinnacle platform for researchers.
Dr. Xuedong David Huang, Chief Technology Officer of Zoom (USA), a member of the VinFuture Prize Council, believes that the VinFuture Grand Prize is a remarkable milestone to honor the deep learning revolution.
This world-leading AI expert asserts that deep learning is a significant advancement for humanity, achieved through three components. The first is deep learning algorithms, which Professors Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Yoshua Bengio have tirelessly researched to push boundaries.
However, according to him, algorithms alone are not enough. The deep learning revolution witnessed worldwide requires a vast amount of data and a computing platform (GPU) for acceleration. Therefore, this year’s VinFuture Grand Prize also honored Professor Fei-Fei Li, who laid the groundwork for ImageNet and the accompanying dataset.
In particular, Dr. Huang emphasized the contributions of Jensen Huang, who pioneered bringing the power of GPUs to the community. “The contribution of the CEO of NVIDIA is immensely important for the explosion of the deep learning revolution,” Dr. Huang stressed.
Billionaire Jensen Huang with four other scientists recognized for creating a deep learning revolution, driving the explosive development of artificial intelligence.
Echoing this sentiment, Professor Soumitra Dutta from the University of Oxford (UK), a member of the VinFuture Prize Council, stated that AI is a booming field over the past decade. This year’s VinFuture Grand Prize has been awarded to individuals who have contributed to that “explosion.”
He noted that VinFuture not only honors exceptional intellect but also acknowledges that deep learning is not just about algorithms. Deep learning is the culmination of algorithms, data, and hardware.
“Without the pioneering resources from NVIDIA, computational applications would not be able to run, nor would we witness the extraordinary calculations or rapid development of AI as we have seen,” Professor Soumitra Dutta analyzed.
Having served on the VinFuture Prize Council for four years, Professor Kostya S. Novoselov from the University of Manchester (UK) admitted that reaching a decision on the award-winning work is a challenging process. It is never a singular decision by one person. For this year’s Grand Prize, the scientific council of VinFuture reached a high level of consensus to make a correct decision honoring the technology that has changed the world recently.
“Without the combined power of computing, modern GPUs and TPUs, databases, and specific algorithms, such achievements cannot be realized,” the 2010 Nobel Prize winner in Physics explained the reasoning behind voting “in favor” of entrepreneur Jensen Huang.
The VinFuture Prize Council, consisting of distinguished scientists from around the world, stated that as a co-founder of NVIDIA, Mr. Huang has led the development of the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) platform, which enables programming GPUs to efficiently handle the enormous computational demands of deep learning. This breakthrough has allowed rapid training of neural networks and made GPUs an essential tool in AI research and development worldwide.
The Prize Council believes that Mr. Huang’s contributions have propelled GPUs to become essential in modern AI research, accelerating innovation in fields such as speech recognition, self-driving cars, medical image processing, and natural language processing.
His innovations have also enabled researchers to process large data sets with unprecedented efficiency and pushed the boundaries of artificial intelligence, driving solutions to tackle global challenges.
