Why did billionaire Jensen Huang - CEO of NVIDIA win the VinFuture 2024 prize?

Billionaire Jensen Huang, CEO of NIVIDIA Corporation, who is not from the academic world, surprised everyone when he became one of five scientists to win the $3 million Main Prize of this year's VinFuture Prize.

On the evening of December 6, the VinFuture 2024 Main Prize worth 3 million USD was awarded to 5 individuals, including 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 promoting the advancement of deep learning.

As the person who directly nominated NVIDIA CEO, Professor Monica Lam (Stanford University, USA), also realized that her nomination was 'a bit different from usual' . She said that nominating hardware experts is a way to recognize the outstanding contributions of the technology industry. Nobel has honored people doing research on AI, but for AI to achieve such a profound impact, it is impossible without hardware.

According to Professor Lam, the commercial success of businessman Jensen Huang is a clear demonstration of the importance of putting science into practice.

'VinFuture is famous for its fair recognition of all, not just outstanding individuals, which is why I nominated NVIDIA CEO' , Prof. Lam revealed.

Billionaire Jensen Huang speaks when receiving the VinFuture 2024 Grand Prize at Ho Guom Theater on the evening of December 6.

Meanwhile, Professor Richard Henry Friend, Chairman of the VinFuture Prize Council, once pointed out a new 'abnormality' that has emerged in the past 50 years. That is the tendency to separate those working in industry from those who only do research. According to him, for the world to function well, it is necessary to connect both.

This is also a rare occasion for a representative from the industry to be honored at an international science and technology award - considered the pinnacle stage of the research community.

Dr. Xuedong David Huang, Chief Technology Officer of Zoom Corporation (USA), Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering, Member of the VinFuture Prize Council, said that the VinFuture Prize is a great milestone to honor the deep learning revolution.

The world's leading AI expert asserts that deep learning is a step forward for humanity, achieved thanks to three factors. First is the deep learning algorithm. This is the problem that Professors Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio have been researching tirelessly to push the boundaries.

But algorithms alone are not enough, he said. The deep learning revolution the world is witnessing requires a huge amount of data and an accelerated computing platform (GPU). That is why this year's VinFuture Prize also honors Professor Fei-Fei Li, who made fundamental contributions to ImageNet and its accompanying dataset.

In particular, Dr. Huang highly appreciated the contribution of Mr. Jensen Huang, who pioneered in bringing the power of GPUs to the entire community. 'The contribution of Nvidia CEO is extremely important for the explosion of the deep learning revolution' , Dr. Huang emphasized.

Billionaire Jensen Huang and four other scientists are credited with revolutionizing deep learning, fueling the explosive growth of artificial intelligence.

Sharing the same view, Professor Soumitra Dutta, Oxford University (UK), member of the VinFuture Prize Council, assessed that AI is a field that has exploded in the past decade. This year's VinFuture Prize was awarded to the individuals who created that 'explosion' .

According to him, VinFuture not only honors outstanding minds, but also does something important by recognizing that deep learning is more than just algorithms. Deep learning is the crystallization of algorithms, data, and hardware.

'Without the pioneering resources from NVIDIA, computational applications would not be able to run, and would not be able to produce the extraordinary calculations or predictions and the rapid development of AI that we have witnessed ,' analyzed Professor Soumitra Dutta.

Having served as a member of the VinFuture Prize Council for 4 years, Professor Kostya S. Novoselov, University of Manchester (UK), admitted that deciding on the winning project is a difficult process. It is never the sole decision of one person. With this year's Main Prize, the VinFuture Scientific Council has achieved a high level of consensus to make the right decision to honor the technology that has changed the world in recent times.

'Without the combined power of computing, modern GPUs and TPUs, databases and specific algorithms, such an achievement would not have been possible,' the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics winner explained his 'yes vote' for entrepreneur Jensen Huang.

The VinFuture Prize Committee, made up of the world's leading scientists, noted that as a co-founder of NVIDIA, Mr. Huang led the development of the CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) platform that enables GPUs to efficiently handle the massive computational demands of deep learning. This breakthrough has enabled the rapid training of neural networks and made GPUs an essential tool in AI research and development worldwide.

The Prize Committee said that Mr. Huang's contributions have made GPUs an essential element in modern artificial intelligence research, accelerating innovation in areas such as speech recognition, self-driving cars, medical image processing, and language processing.

His innovations also enable researchers to process big data with unprecedented efficiency and push the boundaries of artificial intelligence, advancing solutions to global challenges.