Why China is successful in tech - NVIDIA CEO explains | Jensen Huang and Lex Fridman

Uh you've recently traveled to China. Uh so it's interesting to ask you uh China's been incredibly successful in building up its technology sector. What do you understand about um how China is able to over the past 10 years build so many incredible world-class companies, world-class engineering teams and just this technology ecosystem — that produces so many um incredible products? Whole bunch of reasons for well first of all let's start with some facts. 50% of the world's AI researchers are Chinese plus or minus and they're mostly in China still. We have many of them here but there's amazing researchers still in China. Um they their tech industry showed up at precisely the right time at the time of the mobile cloud era. Uh their way of contributing was software. And so this is a country's in incredible science and math. Uh really well educated kids. Um their tech industry was created during the era of software. They're very comfortable with modern software. China is not one giant economic country. It's got many provinces and cities with mayors all competing with each other. That's the reason why there's so many EV companies. AI every company you could imagine. Um they all create some of them and um as a result they have insane competition internally and you know what remains is an incredible company. Um they also have a um social culture where it's family first, friends second and company third. And so, um, the amount of conversation that goes back and forth between they're essentially open source all the time. So, the fact that they contribute more to open source is so sensible because they're probably what are we protecting? You know, my engineers, their brothers are in that company, their friends and they're all schoolmates. you know the schoolmate concept it's a you know one schoolmate your brother for life and um and so they they share knowledge very quickly and so there's no sense keeping technology hidden you might as well put it on open source and so the open source community then amplifies accelerates the innovation process so you get this rapid incredible great talent rapid innovation because of open source and just you the nature of friends and um insane competition among compet among the company what emerges is incredible stuff and so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today and this is something that has everything that I've just said is fundamental to just how the kids were grown the fact that they have excellent education the fact that they parents want them to do well in school the fact that they their culture that way. These are, you know, these are just the thing about their country and they showed up at a precisely the time when technology is going through that exponential. — Plus, culturally, it's pretty cool to be an engineer. It connects to all the components that you're mentioning. — It's a builder nation. — Yeah, it's a builder nation. Um, our country's leaders, incredible, but they're mostly lawyers. They're country's leaders and because we're they're trying to keep us safe. uh rule of law, uh governing. Their country was built out of poverty and so most of their leaders are incredible engineers, some of the brightest minds. To take a small tangent because you mentioned open source, I have to uh go to Perplexity here, who you have been a fan of a long time. I love it. Yeah. And thank you for releasing open source Neatron 3 Super, which you can also use inside Perplexity. look stuff up. — Yeah. — Uh which is uh 120 billion parameter open weight uh model. Uh what's your vision with open source? So you mentioned China with Deep Seek with Miniax with all these companies really pushing forward the open- source uh AI movement and Nvidia is really leading the way in um close to state-of-the-art open source LMS. What's your vision there? — First, if we're going to be a great AI computing company, we have to understand how AI models are evolving.

— One of the things that I love about Neotron 3 is it's not a just a pure transformer model. It's transformer and SSM. And uh we were early in uh developing the uh conditional GANs which that progressive GANs which led step by step to diffusion. And so um the fact that we're doing basic research in model architecture and in different domains gives us visibility into you know what kind of computing systems would do a good job for future models and so it is part of our extreme codeesign strategy. Second, um I think we right rightfully recognize that on the one hand we want worldclass models as products and they should be proprietary. On the other hand, we also want AI to diffuse into every industry and every country, every researcher, every student. And if everything is proprietary, it's hard to do research and it's hard to innovate on top of around with. And so open source is fundamentally necessary for many industries to join the AI revolution. NVIDIA has the scale and we have the motives to not only skills, scale and motivation to build and continue to build these AI models for as long as we shall live. And so therefore, we ought to do that. We can open up, we can activate every industry, every researcher, you know, every country to be able to join the AI revolution. There's a third reason which is for that to recognizing that AI is not just language. These AIs will likely use uh tools and models and sub aents that were trained on other modalities of information. Maybe it's biology or chemistry or um you know laws of physics or you know fluids and thermodynamics and not all of it is in language structure. And so somebody has to go make sure that weather prediction, biology, AI, AI for biology, physical AI, all of that stuff stays can be pushed to the limits and pushed to the frontier. We don't build cars, but we want to make sure every car company has access to great models. We don't discover drugs, but I want to make sure that Lily has the world's best biology AI systems so that they can go use it for discovering drugs. And so these three fundamental reasons both in recognizing that AI is not just language that AI is really broad that we want to engage everybody into the world of AI and then also codeesign of AI. Well, I have to say once again, thank you uh for open sourcing really truly open sourcing uh Neatron 3. And — yeah, I appreciate you were saying that we open source the models, weights, we open source the data, we open source how we created it. — Yeah, it's pretty amazing.