AI will fight the ‘darker side’ of AI — Nvidia CEO

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says there may only be one way to effectively combat the more nefarious uses of artificial intelligence — with more artificial intelligence. 

“It’s going to take AI to catch the darker side of AI,” Huang said at a Sept. 27 event at the Washington, DC think tank the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“The reason for that is pretty clear: AI is going to be producing fake data and false information at very high speeds,” he added. “So it’ll take somebody with very high speeds to detect that and to shut it down.”

Huang — whose company has profited enormously from AI — likened the use of AI to evolving cybersecurity practices, saying “almost every single company” is at risk of a hack or attack at “almost all times.”

“It’s going to take even better cybersecurity to defend ourselves,” he said. “We just have to make sure that we stay ahead; it’s going to take AI to help us stay ahead.”

Concerns over AI-fuelled misinformation and disinformation have been rife in the United States as the country gears up for federal elections in November.

Nearly 60% of surveyed Americans — with a nearly equal split of Democrats and Republicans — said they were “extremely” or “very” concerned about AI being used to create fake information about the presidential candidates, according to a Pew Research Center survey of 9,720 adults published on Sept. 19

About two in five said AI would be used “mostly for bad” in the presidential elections, compared to just 5% who said the opposite.

The survey came days before an unnamed Office of the Director of National Intelligence official told ABC News on Sept. 24 that Russia and Iran are using AI in a bid to influence the election by altering videos of Kamala Harris’ speeches. 

At the think tank’s event, Huang called on the US government to “become a practitioner of AI” and not ”just be a governor of AI.”

He said “every single” government department — naming the Energy and Defence Departments in particular — should be an AI practitioner and floated that the US should “build an AI supercomputer.”

“The scientists would be more than happy to jump on it and create new AI algorithms to advance our country,” Huang said.

AI will teach AI — and it’ll use a lot of energy

The Nvidia boss also speculated that the energy used by AI is set to rise due to “the amount of data that we’re going to train it with.”

He said that in the future, AI data centers will probably need “several — 10 times, 20 times — more” energy than today’s data centers, which the International Energy Agency estimates already use up to 1.5% of global electricity.

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“Future AI models are going to rely on other AI models to learn, and you could use AI models to curate the data so that future AI uses an AI to teach another AI,” Huang said.

He claimed data centers can be built where there’s “excess energy” which is “hard to transport,” as AI “doesn’t necessarily care where it learns.”

“We can transport the data center,” Huang said, “We can build a data center near where there’s excess energy and use the energy there.”

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