On July 30th, Beijing time, at the 51st SIGGRAPH Graphics Conference held in Denver, USA, Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg had a face-to-face public dialogue to discuss the transformative potential of open source AI and AI assistants.

Before the conversation, Zuckerberg first announced the launch of AI Studio, a new platform that allows users to create, share and discover AI characters, making AI more accessible to millions of creators and small businesses.

Huang Renxun said: "In the future, every restaurant and every website may have these AIs."

Zuckerberg responded: "Just like every business has an email address, a website, and a social media account, I think in the future every business will have an AI."

Huang believes that Zuckerberg and Meta are leaders in the field of AI. He said: "You have done a great job in AI. The Pytorch we use comes from Meta." PyTorch is an open source deep learning framework for machine learning and deep learning.

The Importance of Open Source AI

Zuckerberg emphasized the importance of open source in advancing AI, and Huang Renxun also emphasized the importance of open platforms for innovation.

Today, Meta has quickly become a leader in AI, making it work across the business — most notably with the launch of Meta AI, used across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — and advancing open source AI across the industry, most recently with the release of the Llama 3.1 large language model.

Open sourcing the model represents a significant investment of time and training resources. The largest version of Llama has 405 billion parameters and was trained on more than 16,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

“One of the things that’s driving quality is having different models for different types of content,” Zuckerberg explained.

He added: "As the models get bigger and more general, the results will get better. So, I dream that one day you can almost imagine the entire Facebook or Instagram as a single AI model that unifies all of these different content types and systems."

Zuckerberg believes that collaboration is the key to making more progress. In a blog post published last week, Zuckerberg said the release of Llama 3.1 is expected to be a "turning point" for open source adoption in AI.

These advances promise to provide more tools to boost engagement, create compelling and personalized content such as digital avatars, and build virtual worlds.

More broadly, advances in AI across a wide range of ecosystems promise to increase human productivity, for example by providing every person on the planet with one or more digital assistants, enabling people to lead richer lives and interact quickly and fluidly.

“I feel like I’m working with WhatsApp,” Huang said. “Imagine I’m sitting here typing, and it generates images. And when I change the text I’m typing, it generates other images.”

Swearing at closed-source platforms

Zuckerberg has gone through many transformations in his two decades running Meta (formerly Facebook). Lately, he’s been showcasing a seemingly “less filtered” version of himself. In this conversation, Zuckerberg seemed to go off script a bit.

The conversation started out normal, with the two billionaires congratulating each other on their dominance in the field of AI. Before getting into the point, Zuckerberg first talked about a new tool Meta recently released, AI Studio, which allows American users to create their own AI versions on Instagram or the web.

Zuckerberg then gave a lengthy speech expressing his dissatisfaction with Apple. Zuckerberg, who is usually very restrained in public, then expressed the extent of his frustration. He told Huang that when his app was rejected, his reaction was to "explode foul language."

Zuckerberg said: "I mean, this (closed source platform) is a bit too selfish. You know, after building this company for a while, one of the things I want to do in the next 10 or 15 years is to make sure that the basic technology we build (note: such as AI, AR/VR) allows people to provide the social experience they need on it. Because there are too many things we want to build, but we are told by platform providers: 'No, you can't build it'. For this situation, I sometimes swear directly."

Zuckerberg then apologized to Huang Renxun, saying, "I get angry when I talk about closed platforms."

The future vision of AI

Looking ahead, the two CEOs shared their vision for the future of AI.

Zuckerberg expressed optimism about combining AI with the real world through glasses, and cited Meta's collaboration with glasses maker Luxotic as a way to help transform education, entertainment and work.

Huang Renxun emphasized that the interaction between humans and AI is becoming more and more smooth and goes beyond text-based interaction.

"Today's AI is a bit turn-based. You say something and it says something back to you," it said. "But in the future, AI could consider multiple options, or come up with a tree of options and simulate the outcomes, making it much more powerful."

Interchangeable Jackets

As part of the latest "bromance" between the two technology companies, the two CEOs ended their conversation about AI with another "jacket exchange."

The shirt swap is a sequel to their viral exchange in March, when a photo posted on social media showed Zuckerberg wearing Huang's signature black leather jacket and Huang wearing a brown coat that Zuckerberg wore during his trip to Asia.

This time, Zuckerberg gave Huang another black leather jacket. Although this one was a little bulkier, it had a hood similar to Zuckerberg's brown coat.

Huang Renxun gave Zuckerberg his leather jacket, which his wife had prepared for the SIGGRAPH conference. Huang Renxun joked that he had only worn it for two hours. Zuckerberg smiled and said, "It's more valuable because you wore it."

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