Transcript
0:02 Jensen, welcome to Kazakhstan and it's such a pleasure to have you here. Let me first start by thanking yourself and Nvidia team for the partnership that we have. It spans from the first supercomputers, educational programs and of course the Hakalem hackathon which was set a Guinness World Record and the local telecom operators are building their infrastructure with powered by Nvidia technology and of course our flagship project and AI data center valley which is designed around tens of thousands advanced Nvidia chips and Kazakhstan is building one of the largest in the world AI gigafactory.
0:52 So in in Berlin you challenged Europe how to build the AI economy and today I will we would like to explore what with this the development of AI what the future looks like for Kazakhstan for the people of Kazakhstan and for the talents and economy. So let's start the you are talking about the five layer cake and Kazakhstan is also approaching the development of AI throughout the five layer cake. The foundation and the most important one is the energy and Kazakhstan is investing into the energy infrastructure and we are planning to almost double our installed energy capacity by 2035 and make it above 40 gaw. So energy is intelligence doesn't mean that the countries that have limited access to energy, they will have a limited access to intelligence. Let's start with that one. Well, first of all, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for the great welcome.
1:57 I want to congratulate your president and Kazakhstan for declaring that Kazakhstan will be an AI nation. It's incredibly visionary and it has Yeah, that's right. You should be commended for your foresight and recognizing that this is a a global technology reset and what an incredible opportunity it is for Kazakhstan. I I want to congratulate you.
2:30 >> Thank you >> for your leadership in helping guide Kazakhstan's AI journey and in just a very short time frankly you've made incred incredible progress. while the rest of the world is deciding how to engage and how to build the AI economy here in Kazakhstan, you're doing it already. I I think Yeah, that's right.
3:03 at the core AI is a new technology that is reshaping every industry because this is a general purpose technology and because of its transformative capabilities for every single industry, for every single citizen, for every company, for every country. this is a technologydriven industrial revolution. This industrial revolution is going to affect every single every single person, every country. however, it is also going to be a new industry in itself, not just the technology. It's a new industry in itself because AI is manufacturing.
3:49 It has to be generated in real time. It cannot be precomputed and because it's generated in real time for every single use it needs to have a new type of factory. >> Nvidia creates the computing systems that power AI factories and it's these AI factories requires natural resources and the natural resources it needs is electricity.
4:19 It needs electricity. It needs data and it needs offtake. The offtake is coming from the inspiration of the leadership in Kazakhstan. You're inspiring all of your young people, students, universities, scientists of the industries. You're inspiring them to engage the AI industry, the engage the AI economy. That's where the offtake's going to come from. Kazakhstan has a fundamental advantage because you have so much natural resource already. You have so much energy and instead of just exporting energy in the future, you could transform the energy into intelligence and export intelligence.
5:09 However, in order to do all that, you also need to transform your own data. And one of the important observations and I'm very happy to see that there is Kazak LLM that you are already transforming, harnessing, processing your own data into your own intelligence. It's important to realize that your country's data embodies and codes your country's culture, history, your humanity, your values are captured in the data and that data belongs to you. Just as your natural resources belong to you, the data of your society is also part of your natural resource. Now you're able to combine the natural resources of energy, the natural resource of the Kazakhstan data of your people in combination with a computation system from Nvidia, you should be able to produce the intelligence necessary to drive all of the AI economy here in Kazakhstan, which is your vision. Your vision is to create the next economy, the digital economy, the AI economy for Kazakhstan. And so the five layer cake is an excellent framework. And you have all of the assets, all of the natural resources to do so.
6:46 >> Yeah. Yeah. We use the five layer cake is just the main pillar of our digital Kazakhstan strategy for the next 5 to 10 years. So and too cuz currently the total addressable market of AI exceeds 50 trillion US and you know at which layer there will be the highest value captured. So therefore maybe we're in the beginning of the process we have to move in the systemic way with the all five layers. Jensen you mentioned about Kaz LLM. Yeah. Let's speak about a bit sovereignty AI sovereign AI. So the people are questioning whether we need to have our own Kazak GPT. So we want that AI understands and speaks Kazak and captures cultural contexts and cultural specifics. So we built several models Kazak large language models based on open-source openweight foundation models. So at what point it makes sense or it's worthwhile to build the our own foundation model from the scratch or does it really make sense at all? I think it makes complete sense and in fact I believe it to be a national security concern and let me tell you why.
8:10 Intelligence is foundational. Intelligence is general purpose. Intelligence affects every single citizen, every single company, every single country. A country's intelligence is produced from its data. And as we mentioned earlier, your country's data is your natural resource. It belongs to you. You cannot export something as fundamental as your people's culture and values and export that to import the intelligence from someone else. It makes no sense. It is so you want to control your own data. You want to control your natural resource.
8:58 You also want to control the delivery of the service to your people. Just as you have Kazak Telecom, you have your own electric grid in the future, you will have your own electric grid, your own internet, your own telecommunications and your own intelligence grid. It makes no sense for the intelligence grid which comes from which powers every part of your country to be delivered from another country.
9:35 It is okay to have another country and company supplement but it cannot be completely and so you have to have some ability to deliver the basic infrastructure services for your own country. The creation of a Kazak LLM Kazlm is sensible because the invention of the technology is difficult but the application the adaptation of the technology is not so difficult. It's of course not easy, but Kazakhstan has a wealth of science and technology and mathematicians and you have so many programmers. The developers here are rich. You're rich with expertise here.
10:28 So you should be able to take open-source technology, open mono technology, apply it to your language, apply it to your culture so that you can run and operate the infrastructure of intelligence yourself here. >> Yeah, we also believe that open source allows us to be sovereign and use it on premise with the sensitive data and we have our own we built our own tokenizer collected tokens. We know how to train to finetune. So this talent development and human capital development is quite important >> and I saw so many today already.
11:04 >> Yes. Exactly. And you've seen by the way you >> so many startups are here. >> Yeah. And you've seen some of them are in the physical AI space. So let's talk a little bit about this physical AI as you call it. It's a it's a next wave. people got used to feel AI through the screens on the screens on their laptops, computers, smartphones but now with the next wave it's moving into the u physical AI and where the robots and other hardware systems are interact with each other and work together. So Kazakhstan is a rich on heavy industries. So we have factories mines transport agriculture >> agriculture transport and logistics infrastructure and of course talented people with the deep expertise in those industries and so how what should Kazakhstan do in order to become a hub or a hub for training the robots?
12:09 You've seen some initial work already. So our specialists know how to train the robots, how to train the models and work with them. So what do you think the Kazakhstan to become a hub and maybe the one of the main partners for Nvidia to train the models for physical AI? >> It's a fantastic idea and I think it's also an imperative for you to do so. You want Kazakhstan to be an AI nation. AI starts with cognitive AI, cognitive intelligence, soft intelligence, but AI includes everything all the way to physical AI. Physical AI is the largest industry of all of course because most of the world includes interaction and understanding of the physical world. You also have very important application here yourself.
13:02 Mining and natural resources and agriculture all of the your own indigenous industries today would benefit from the next phase with physical AI. Now physical AI is not just robotics. Robotics is going to be very important. But physical AI includes everything from seismic understanding to mapping mines and wells to understanding geography hund and geology where to mine how best to mine understanding material science, the processing of chemicals.
13:43 All of that is going to be part of physical AI and AI will be able to tremendously transform each one of those fields from the mining of the processing of the minerals to the transformation of the minerals into new materials in every single stage of that will benefit from physical AI. Now we're at the beginning of the physical AI journey. This is the next wave. And so everybody is in the beginning. This is a great opportunity for you to participate to help shape this future industry in the future. Just as we will have artificial general intelligence for cognit cognitive intelligence, cognitive AI, we will have artificial general robotics. And I saw some today. Cosbot was an example of art the beginnings of artificial general robotics and I have great great hopes and ambition that this will be a very large industry and we're delighted to partner with the robotics company here.
14:50 I was so happy to see Nvidia is already working with all of them and so it's great to see >> and we will try to produce artificial general engineers. >> That's right. artificial general farmers, artificial general miners, artificial general scientists, every single field. >> Great. One of the main question that concerns people sitting around us is their jobs and how AI will convert their working lives. So everyone is curious about whether AI will help make their jobs better or will lead for them to left behind. So what do you think what should people care about and use their energy for developing them in five maybe next five years.
15:48 The only thing that matters is do you have ambition? If you have ambition, then AI and robotics will lift you. It will empower you to do more. If you were a farmer and you have ambition, the robots will help you farm. But because you have ambition, you can expand your operation. You can expand your horizon. You can expand your business. If you are a scientist and you have ambition, then your AI assistant will expand the universe that you can explore.
16:42 If you are an engineer and you have ambition, then your AI engineer will allow you to explore better designs. And so the question is simply, do you have ambition? If you have ambition, and I believe you do, this is the first country that I've been to where the president declared the country to be at AI nation.
17:14 In that case, AI will lift your nation. AI will lift your people. AI will expand your company so that you can compete and expand globally. AI will transform your society. That's how I would think about AI. ambition and the talent and creativity should be taken through the since the childhood. So you've seen all these kids today the tumo program that spans from 12 to 18 years old.
17:48 You've seen the tomorrow school in partnership with the call 42 the peer-to-peer education which is the 18 plus and we >> those are all people with ambition. Yes. >> Children with ambition. >> Yeah. Yeah. So we embed AI into education into schools, universities and the concern that people expressing right now, how do we make sure that AI helps children to become better thinkers rather than just relying purely on AI and to make it harmful for them.
18:26 Again the question is whether that child has ambition and aspiration. If the child wants to learn more AI will help them learn more. If the a if the child wants to do less then the AI of course can help them do less. And so it is our job as parents to imbue our children, instill our children with hope, ambition, aspiration to help them dream bigger. And when you dream big, then AI will lift you to achieve that. Same exact idea for children as well as for adults, for companies as well as countries and nations.
19:14 If you have aspiration, if you have ambition and it requires the leadership to instill ambition just as president Tokyo instilled ambition for the nation to be an AI nation. That's ambition is as all the companies that I've met so far, you have ambition to be great. You have ambition to be global. You have ambition to be international. That ambition will be powered by AI. And so the most important thing we need to do as country leaders like yourself, as CEOs like myself, my friends, as parents, is to instill upon our people, our families, our companies, our nation. Instill upon them ambition. Let me give you a real example of ambition then. So we have we talk about this youth ambition and the real case of ambition. So let me turn to our AI unicorn the Hixel AI.
20:18 So I think this is the greatest example of ambition of young people. It's our first unicorn. The average age of the team is 25. And by the way, we have a main co-founders here with us today and we have Alex Marshafov and Yad Bulat along with their broader team here. So please stand guys. Yeah, the company is valued at the multi-billion valuation right now and I have a good update, good news for the people around us and those watching online.
21:04 Nvidia has invested into Hixel AI. J just a few words about Hixold AI. So what really made Nvidia to decide in order to in order to invest into Hicksville? So just for the other followers to be what should be a northern star for them in order to be in compliant compliant to the investment decisions as yourselves.
21:38 >> Well the first thing is this. The first thing and the last thing is you invest in people not companies and the founders of Hicksfield are visionary in the work that they do. They had a wonderful idea. It's not easy to do it. It require and they have global comp competitors. They have global competitors. Many of them are in San Francisco and United States. incredibly wellunded and formidable expertise but these are some of the brightest people in the world. They have an 600 people here in Kazakhstan and you have average age of 25 years old. Many of them are deep tech engineers and deep tech computer scientists already with offices here in Kazakhstan and in United States.
22:33 you're able to bridge the culture and the expertise from two different nations and they're competing globally. And so, you know, when you're investing in a company, you're really investing in people. And so, you have to select the best people. I've been to their offices once. They start their work at 5:00 p.m. They're sitting, they're looking for a new office. They're expanding. They used to be like 150 people. Start at 5:00 p.m.
23:07 I want my money back. >> But they work nights. >> I start at 5:00 a.m. Today I start at 4:00 a.m. So they're expanding right now looking for an office like 20,000 square meter office and it's a great ecosystem. So talented engineers. Well, Kazakhstan has a lot of real estate. It also has a lot of energy >> and the DC valley has one gigawatt planned. And so you're going to have a lot of compute right here in Kazakhstan, right? And so it's it's going to be a hub, a computing hub, an AI factory hub for all of Europe. The telecommunications interconnection that you created completely visionary. Now it put Kazakhstan right in the middle of the European AI ecosystem and then you could feel the AI economy throughout.
24:09 Fantastic. Let's talk a little bit let's talk a little bit about the security issues. So we see u I mean quite recent news on some security hacks, jailbreaks and so on. Does Nvidia plan to develop a technology that's embedded into the hardware whenever there are models got hacked or something happening wrong with the models? Will there be a technology on the hardware on the hardware of Nvidia that helps to mitigate those risks?
24:52 Well, in order for us to enjoy, for the world to enjoy the positive benefits and the incredible opportunities that will be created by AI, we have to develop it and advance it and deploy it responsibly. Just as when we're building self-driving cars, safety is vital from the very beginning. Just as when you're mining and you want to have a mining industry, safety is vital from the very beginning.
25:23 And so if we want if we want society to benefit from AI, it is important and it's the responsibility of the creators, the creators like Nvidia, creators like Hicksfield that we advance this technology in a responsible way. The technology to keep AI safe is foundational technology as well. The technology has to be invented. The technology has to be engineered. We created a technology called open shell.
25:55 Open shell contains this autonomous system. These agents are essentially self-driving cars or robots inside a computer. And if you give them access to files and access to tools, they will freely go about to access the files to do their job. And so we have to contain them to make sure that whatever access is exactly the access we want it to have, whatever privileges are limited to what it needs to it needs in order to do its job. And we need to monitor it at all time. And so the technology for deploying for even creating the AI safely is called open shell and I advi everybody to use it.
26:43 >> Yeah, the the the definitely there are lots of new ideas that coming up especially in this fast changing environment. Has there been any particular situation where you change your mind about AI in the past year? No, I I'm more enthusiastic today about AI than I was a year ago. And I was very enthusiastic a year ago. I the the big breakthroughs in AI this last year, especially with agentic systems, we've made AI useful now. in fact if you look at the Hicksfield generated videos in just one year's time it has improved tremendously.
27:31 In the beginning Hicksfield was able to generate short videos. Now you can generate very long videos that is temporally and physically con consistent. it tells a story for a very long period of time. It's not possible without agentic reasoning systems. And so the technology has become very useful in video generation of course word generation and software coding and robotic systems and drug discovery in so many different fields.
28:06 these systems have become very very useful and we we haven't mentioned you and we didn't have a chance to present you that a months ago we were running the first AI film festival so which it's a contest with more than 8,000 applications videos submitted of more than 100,000 minutes in total with the more than 120 countries participated with the $2 million price and >> with how much?
28:40 >> $2 million price pool. >> Wow. >> And and for the jury, it was very difficult to determine which video is better. It's >> Kazakhstan's going to be the home of the Khan Festival of AI films. >> It's a des decentralization of Hollywood. Uhhuh. Okay. Yeah, that's terrific. >> So, for the sake of time, yeah, we have to wrap it up. And just a final one.
29:13 I have a question from the audience here. And so if you were 18 years old and living in Kazakhstan today, what would you spend the next 5 years learning and building? Well, I I envy being 18 years old today. And the reason for that is because the world is changing so rapidly and there's a complete reset because of technology. You know when I was I was fortunate because when I was 18 years old the personal computer was just becoming possible and my generation was I I've been working for 43 years. My generation was defined by the creation of the computer.
30:05 And all of our four decades of endeavors has led to now artificial intelligence, which is a complete reset of everything that we've done. Instead of programming the computer, you have to learn how to program AI. And so that young man here in Kazakhstan, you're 18 years old. AI is now new for you. It's new for everybody else. I would dedicate myself to be the world's best programmer of AI.
30:44 You know, AI is has the ability to automate. It has the ability to partner with us. Has ability to assist us. But just as you partner with some human you and you have assistant from somebody you have to learn how to interact you have to learn how to program each other. Do they have to learn the technical skills or just social sciences in order to do better prompting? >> You need both. You need to understand the best programmer of AI is someone who understands how AI works. The best user of a machine is someone who understands how the machine works. The best driver of a race car is someone who understands how the car works. And so the best programmer of AI should understand how the machinery of AI works, what its what its fundamental principles are, what its strengths are, weaknesses are, how it's developing, where it will be in the future. And so all of these properties about the technology must be understood if you want to un if you want to harness the capability of AI to the fullest. And so you have a lot of technical reasons to engage AI and you have extraordinary potential when you learn how to program AI, how to use AI.
32:07 >> And probably you've seen that the children and the youth that we have here at LMAI, they're probably on the right track. Well, they were upstairs already using AI, programming AI. >> Yeah. >> Well, thank you, Jensen. So, it was such a pleasure to have you here on the fireside chat. It's your it's your first visit to Kazakhstan and hope not the last one. And we look forward to expanding our partnership with Nvidia. >> Get a round of applause to Jensen.
32:34 >> Thank you. >> Thank you. And we have thank you. And we have a small Kazak tradition to our respected guests. We usually give our present which is called Shopan. Oh wow. >> For you to feel like a king of AI.
33:07 >> Wow. Yeah, this is the Kazak traditional robe of honor >> given to our most esteemed guest. So, yes, wear it with joy. It It fits you very well. Let's move on. Thank you.