EP 322: NVIDIA Speaks on 6G and AI - The Future of Communication in Your Pocket

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We're on our phones kind of all day, right, Communicating with the rest of the world, talking to our colleagues. The there's so much that we can accomplish on the go now, but what about when we think about the future and AI, right? There's a good chance many of us are on a 5G network right now. But what about 6G? What comes next for the future of mobile, the future of AI, and how those two areas intersect? We're going to be talking about that today with one of the leaders in the industry from Nvidia about this exact thing. So I'm extremely excited for, for today's episode, 6G and AI the Future of communication in your pockets. All right, what's going on, y'? All? My name's Jordan Wilson and this is Everyday AI, and this is for you. This is your daily guide on how to learn what's happening in the world of artificial intelligence and how we can use generative AI to grow our companies and to grow our careers. So if that's you, you are in the right place. If you're listening on the podcast, appreciate it. As always, make sure to check out your show notes for more on today's conversation, because we're going to be recapping all all of the important takeaways in our newsletter that you can get right now. If you go to your everydayai.com sign, sign up for free. So before we get started on today's conversation, let's talk about what's going on the AI news. So first, regulators in the U.S. and Europe have united to protect competition in the AI industry. So the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, an international antitrust enforcer from the EU, and the U.S. department of justice have jointly committed to safeguarding competition the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem. So this initiative that they released a joint statement on aims to ensure fair and honest treatment for both consumers and businesses addressing the significant competition risks posed by AI. So this joint statement, and you can read that in today's newsletter, it emphasizes vigilance against tactics that could undermine fair competition or lead to deceptive practices within the AI landscape. All right, our next piece of AI news. We just slipped this into the newsletter yesterday, but missed it for the podcast. But Mistral has released a flagship new AI model called Large 2 challenging OpenAI and Meta. So Mistral has unveiled its latest AI model, Large 2, which the company claims rivals the latest models from OpenAI and Meta in terms of co generation, mathematics and reasoning. The release of Large 2 comes literally just a day after Meta launched its own open Source Large Model Llama 31405B and right after OpenAI said fine tuning with on its new GPT4O mini model would be free through September. So Large 2 boasts superior performance in co generation and math, achieving this with only 123 billion parameters compared to llama31's 405 billion and the old school quote unquote GPT4 that had 1.8 trillion parameters. So these models are getting smaller and more powerful in the model is available on platforms like Google's Vertex AI, Amazon, Bedrock, Azure, AI Studios, IBM, WatsonX, etc and on Mistral's own website. All right, last but not least, here's a funny one. So Google has launched a quote Golden Prompt competition to enhance the effectiveness of its AI products with winners receiving unique prizes. This initiative aims to improve AI driven productivity within the Google workforce and collaboration tools in real world applications. So Google announced their Golden Prompt competition for its Gemini Works Space product, encouraging their employees to create efficient AI instructions. The competition aims to improve AI driven tools like emails, calendars and meet Winners receive golden bomber jackets with a white Gemini symbol or spot bonuses. All right, so much more happening in the world of AI news. We'll be going over that in the newsletter and more on those stories. So if you haven't already, make sure to go to your everyday AI.com and sign up for that free free daily newsletter. All right, let's get into today's conversation. Hey good, good morning and thanks for joining us live. Everyone. Michael and Rolando, Fred and Christopher, Chris, Jason everyone, thanks for joining us. If you have questions, get them in now because I'm excited for today's guest. We're going to be talking about 6G and AI, the future of communication. Extremely excited for this one. So please help me welcome to the show. There we go, we got him. Ronnie Vasishta, who is the Senior Vice President of Telecom at Nvidia. Ronnie, thank you so much for joining the Everyday AI show.

Well, thank you very much for having me, Jordan. Looking forward to a good conversation.

Yeah. And, and hey, you know you podcast listeners, you gotta understand this is a live stream as well. So shout out to Ronnie for waking up at 5ish am and joining us west coast time. But Ronnie, can you tell us a little bit about what you do in your role at Nvidia?

Sure, yeah. So as you said, Senior Vice President of Telecom at Nvidia and my role is responsibility for Nvidia's telecom initiatives. And that's a very broad range, which I'm sure we'll get into some parts of that range in this conversation. A very broad range of areas. Everything from the infrastructure that supports the telecommunications network and how Nvidia accelerated compute can really is changing the landscape of that infrastructure which has been, it's a big task because that's infrastructure has been around the same form of infrastructure for quite a few decades and then all the way to how telecommunication networks are being used and how it provides services which of course are becoming more AI centric, but even video over telecommunications network. So whether it be for businesses or consumers, and how do you interact with the telecommunications network, meaning on your phone, etc. So a lot of new services and capabilities that Nvidia platforms can offer over.

The network and Ronnie, I kind of want to start here with the basics, right. Because even I'm not sure, right. Like I, it's like I knew when 5G first came out, I'm like, oh, that means, you know, communications will improve and yeah, people will be able to stream videos to their phones. What does 6G mean for both, you know, consumers but also for businesses? Because you know, I think a lot of people just see it as another, you know, letter out there and they're like, okay, this just means something's going to be faster. But let's just talk about 6G first. What does this mean for the future of communications and when might we all be seeing 6G? Kind of out in the, the wild.

Yeah, so maybe I'll take the last piece first, which is generally every 10 years you, it varies a little bit, but generally every 10 years you see a new G and the three GPP standards develop a new node or a new G. So probably around 2028 to 2030 is the current estimation of when 6G will be deployed into the. For you and I. So what is 6G? Well, we're still as an industry in the process of defining what is 6G. What has happened traditionally, and I would say in 5G it really happened more, is that there's certain types of use cases of the network that start defining the concept of what is that G. Let me give you an example. In 5G it was to some extent it was around machine to machine communication. It was the ability to provide lower latency network, meaning that you could control things in a more efficient way. The reality is probably not many of those applications have really come around in the 5G space. 5G has been predominantly around faster communication, throughput and speeds. So you can watch videos on your phone, download videos, upload videos in a more efficient way, even improved coverage. There have been changes in the infrastructure underneath the 5G network that have enabled those kind of things to happen. As we look forward to 6G, 6G takes on the same kind of Persona, which is use cases that will drive the 6G definition. However, these use cases because of the advent of AI today, it's really exciting time because there's enough time before the release of 6G to really infuse AI into both in the infrastructure that provides the 6G network, but also the use models. Things like inferring inference on the phone, inference of applications such as agents that you can talk to any language anywhere. Lower latency autonomous vehicle control. Such autonomous vehicles can become more prevalent and safer. The ability to provide the robots, whether the robot being a warehouse robot, an industrial robot, or a food delivery robot, things like that, but always connected all the time, making sure that the fleet management aspect of these things is very efficient. So there's just some examples of how 6G will be starting to transform the things that we do.

And speaking of transforming the things that we do, I mean, artificial intelligence and large language models has transformed everything, especially when it comes to communication. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing. Even though I talk live to humans most days, experts like yourself, I spend more time talking to AI bots than I do humans. Right. So where does artificial intelligence come into play for the future of telecoms? And even, you know, this 5G, 6G transition, how does AI play into that equation?

Yeah, so I think of it as broadly two separate things, but they are connected. In 6G, there's going to be a much more important level of compute. The two things that I was referring is the infrastructure that provides a 6G connectivity. And there we're going to see the fusion of compute and connectivity. Like to say, intelligently connecting intelligence. Up until now, 5G has been mostly around pipes that just transfer data. They haven't really been intelligent pipes. With 6G, the infrastructure is going to become much more intelligent that will have the fusion of compute and connectivity, as I said. And AI is going to play a very important role in the infrastructure piece. In fact, how do you ensure that connectivity of the right latency of the right throughput is always there in a downtown urban environment versus a rural environment. AI is going to make that, ensure that that can happen. How do you get. Spectrum is incredibly important and incredibly expensive. How do you improve spectral efficiency, meaning getting more data and more throughput and more connectivity out of the available spectrum. AI is going to play a really important role in that. And then there's the second part. The second part is AI in terms of the services that are provided to, whether it be to businesses or to individuals, The AI is going to play a very important role in how you and I interact with the network and the services that can be provided over the network, whether it be in a, in a business, in enterprise setting, like in a port, in a transportation hub, in a warehouse, in a retail outlet, or whether it be, you know, a consumer device. And the devices are going to change. We're going to have obviously more headset availability. We're going to have more reality on in the headset. We're going to have the ability to have agents on our phone that you can book your travel and doctor's appointments and things like that. And you want to have that connectivity, accessible, accessibility all the time. So think of it as infrastructure. AI plays a role and services.

So, you know, Ronnie, something you said in there, it's pretty interesting to me because, you know, you talked about all these new capabilities that, you know, AI and edge AI, you know, might bring into the fold. But then, you know, you also said it might be another four to six years until we kind of see, you know, six G realized. So, you know, in the short term, right, when we're getting more and more artificial intelligence, we're getting more edge AI, we're getting more and more agents to talk to, right, and more AI to use, is there going to be almost a bottleneck period where we're getting so much innovation that's putting a lot of strain on our current communication systems? Is there going to be this period for the next couple of years where maybe the systems are a little overloaded until we get this next 6G iteration?

That's a great question, Jordan. Obviously, the three GPP standards evolve. So while we talk about 5G, 6G, there's intermediate steps as well, like 5G advanced. And what we're going to see is some of these aspects infusing into the 5G network as much as they can to support some of the capabilities and features that you're talking about. And by the way, as I said earlier, 5G really hadn't lived up to its expectations or its design early on. And so we're going to start seeing that evolution of 5G advanced, start to be able to promise the low latency, the throughput type of the machine to machine communication. And that will enable quite a few of those AI applications that I talked about. The infrastructure side of 6G and how AI becomes what we call an AIR native interface, for instance, meaning that AI is AI. AIR native interface, meaning AI enables that AIR interface and spectral efficiency to be enabled. That's going to be, I think, quite a game changer and that will be a 6G. So think of it as a ramp up of these services and capabilities. And then once 6Gs are in place, we're going to see more of an explosion of the capabilities of what we're ramping up to now.

Speaking of capabilities and what we're ramping up to, Nvidia for years now has been the leader in this space about allowing the rest of the world to create new technologies. Whether we're talking about compute, whether we're talking about different things in video games, communications, Nvidia has been at the forefront for all, all of this. With that in mind, what are you even personally in your role, at least looking forward to when it comes to kind of this intersection of AI and how that changes communications? What are those things that you're even personally excited about? New breakthroughs and enhancements?

Yeah. So I must say working at Nvidia has been incredibly exciting because of the being at the forefront of many of these technologies and telecommunications is, is one of those areas, I think that is, to use an overused term, transformed by AI. The transformation is what is excites me in what I do. We're already starting to see, of course, the, the leverage of generative AI. And as I'm going in my daily work work, we're starting to interface with many, many more telecom operators around the world, some of whom are investing in AI infrastructure, AI factories. This is a completely new business model that hasn't been open to a telecommunications industry that has been very traditionally focused on delivering consumers connectivity. Now telecom operators around the world, and you know, I've been going around the world meeting many of them who are building, investing capital in AI factories such that they can create new business models for the operator. The other thing that is very exciting for us is we're starting to see some of these services that are being delivered. We're just at the very tip of the iceberg of how we interact with generative AI. What kind of language models do we have on the phone? What kind of language models do we now have on a local compute? You use the word edge in your question. To me, edge has been talked about for a long time, but it hasn't really ever delivered on what it was meant to deliver on. Generative AI gives it the opportunity now to have a really intelligent Edge that can deliver the services again. Exciting, because infrastructure is changing dramatically. Services that are being delivered over the network are changing dramatically and are dependent upon the infrastructure. So every day, you know, at work, we're starting to see this transformation happening across our industry.

You know what, I do want to dive into that a little bit deeper here. Edge AI, because I think on device. Generative AI on device. Large language models, in my opinion. Right. But this is why I bring on people way smarter than me. But I think that is going to change how all of us communicate, both personally and professionally through a company. And it also seems like even over the last week, we just talked at the top of the show about Mistral's new model getting smaller and smaller. OpenAI's model smaller. Matislama smaller. As these models become small enough and powerful enough to actually fit on a smartphone, how does that change? Not just how we work, how we speak, how we communicate, but how does that change what is possible when we can have a large language model model running locally on our device that goes with us everywhere?

Yeah, so there's always going to be a limitation around the level of compute on a device because of battery power. And of course, we all expect a certain level of battery life on our device, whether it be a headset going forward or whether it be a smartphone. Now, if you think about a use case, you can immediately say how valuable that is. You're in an environment where five languages are being spoken. You know, you've got an earphone and you're speaking in the language that you're native to, but you're hearing everybody's language translation coming to you in the language you're used to. And same for everybody else in that group. That kind of compute complexity, there needs to be a accessibility to a compute power that probably isn't going to fit on your phone. And that's what I was talking about, Edge, where you start to see these nodes of AI that have a latency capability and in the case of video, a jitter capability also that can service you to meet that experience that you want to have. So there's going to be, as I mentioned earlier, intelligently connecting intelligence. There'll be a level of intelligence on the phone of inference capabilities, and there'll be a level of intelligence that has to be accessible close enough to the phone for that experience to be valid. And that's what we're going to start seeing more and more of. So yes, we'll see intelligence on the phone and yes, we'll see a new topology of edge that hasn't been there today and that's going to be orchestrated to a large extent by AI.

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You know that use case right there, that example I think is, it's pretty profound, right? And that's something I think that we can think about how it impacts us personally and impacts how business can be done, right? Like if, if your phone in real time can, can translate language with low latency. I mean that really opens up a world of opportunities for everyone to connect in more meaningful ways. What are future pieces of communication? Ronnie, similar to that, that you know, kind of when we talk about, you know, AI edge, AI when we talk about stronger telecom networks, you know, 6G, what are maybe some other example use cases such as that that really might change the way that we work or maybe change the way we can work and open up new possibilities.

Yeah, I think one of the one often talked about but not realized yet is the collaboration aspect. Whether it be visiting a different part of the world, whether it be collaborating with work colleagues for a design of a vehicle, a house, enabling your designer of your house to, you know, kind of interact with you as you in a real world environment, as you walk through that, that house or that factory yet to be built and you're wearing headsets and you're communicating with each other and the ability to provide that visual collaboration experience as well that I think is also a game changer. Visual collaboration with Real Time audio and Real Time Audio in the language of your choice. So these are kind of experiences and then of course, you know, autonomous vehicles and fleet management, while you and I can't really experience that or see that today, but there's a tremendous opportunity for the ability to manage fleets, whether they be delivery robots or whether they be autonomous vehicles driving around the road. You know, the network has to be capable of supporting connectivity for safety as well as fleet management reasons. Of all of those devices, there have been incidents where a concept turns out in a city, the network usage goes up and then all the autonomous vehicles in that city grind to a halt because the network outage. We've got a tremendous, I think opportunity ahead of us. And you said earlier Nvidia Enable as allowing others to develop what we. You absolutely hit it on the nail on the head, which is Nvidia is a platform company. We actually don't even know some of the applications that we will see as others take advantage of the platforms that we're able to provide. And we're going to see many, many of these types of applications that will drive somebody. Talk about the killer app. But the use of the telecom networks.

You know, you brought up something again that, that has me thinking here, right? So maybe I'm thinking a lot of this current technology that we're seeing today maybe can't perform at the level we might want it to, right? Because of, you know, there's just too much compute needed and right now a 5G network maybe can't handle it. Right. So I was lucky enough to, you know, be at GTC this year. Nvidia's this conference and you know, I got to saw, you know, your CEO Jensen Wong kind of, you know, come out on stage with all these robots and you know, they talked about Groot, the new foundation model and Isaac Robotics. So even when we talk about that end, right, because there's a lot of news that even just came out today, we'll have in our newsletter just about, you know, expectations of, you know, robotics and humanoid robots and in factories and even in normal like quote unquote office spaces, right? What, what kind of hurdles are, are still needed to, to start realizing some of these things, you know, because I'm guessing, you know, when you have an Internet connected large language model on a humanoid robot, you know, computer vision, I'm guessing there's a lot of things on the network side that still have to happen in order for some of these kind of realizations to, to actually happen. So how do you see that playing out in the coming years?

Yeah, so there's connectivity constraints that will limit maybe mobility and a wide area network. There'll be some, as I mentioned earlier, some visual engagement constraints, visual constraints over a network like jitter and like latency. That will mean that, you know, the, the experience might not be as, as realistic as you want. Continuously the generation of video through large language models, for instance, as you're generating video over a network, for instance. So there'll be, as I said before, there'll be kind of a ramp up. We are seeing advances in the network. We're starting to also see some telecom operators investing in infrastructure that is closer to the point of use and connecting that infrastructure to the traditional 5G network. But I think in terms of mobility, in terms of experience, some of those will be constrained in terms of a wide area network by the telecommunications network.

And a great question here from Jason, you kind of mentioned this earlier, earlier, but I want to dive in a little bit deeper. So Jason here asking, will we start to see more value in 5G or do we have to wait for 6G? So Ronnie, you kind of mentioned this like 5G advance, I think you said, is, is what it's called. So kind of what are these, you know, over the next four to six years until we might see a 6G. What are some of these 5G improvements that we might see? Specifically how are they going to change the way that we can do business, you know, here versus, you know, I know we kind of talked about more of the personal side, but you know what, 5G advancements might change how we can do business in the coming years until 6G.

Yeah. So the good news is we don't have to wait to 6G. As I said, there are advances in the network capabilities and 5G monetization opportunities within an enterprise, whether it be in a port or transportation hub, an airport. There are advances in terms of how you can put compute closer to the point of use. And we're doing Nvidia, that's a big focus for us, is to enable the convergence of connectivity and compute in a server, meaning that one server can handle both the connectivity compute and AI compute and can orchestrate and provision one. As for instance, you know, in a city or in an enterprise, people go home at night. Why have the radio access network underutilized at that point? Because it's a separate network. If you combine the computer, you can use those spare cycles at that time for things like AI training or inference, or you can do Some AI applications on that compute when it's available. That's all capable. That's all starting to happen in 5G. We're starting to see cameras, for instance, at airports, when a plane comes into the jetway, certain functions, people need to come off and on, and you start to have certain service vehicles coming in and out that can all be managed actually through cameras and autonomously. And that improves productivity. So there's things that are starting to happen like that in the 5G network, so you don't have to wait to 6G. But of course, as I said before, 6G gives us new opportunities and new capabilities, both on how the infrastructure is built for communication networks with AI and then also the services.

So, Ronnie, we've talked about a lot in today's episode. We've, you know, even talked about autonomous vehicles. We talked about edge AI and some of the obstacles until that's fully realized. And we've even touched on the future of communications that. Or future communications that 6G may bring that we don't even have or even understand right now. But, you know, as we wrap up today's show, what's maybe the one most important thing that you want business leaders to understand when we talk about the future of communication and how AI impacts that?

Yeah. So I would say for the business audience, those involved in telecommunications, I would say the future is extremely bright. AI can transform again, to use overused term, but really change the business models around telecommunications. And that's what I'm really focused on. It's incredibly exciting because those of you who are involved in the communications network, whether it be an operator or whether it be the users of telecommunications network, you're going to have a highly productive, highly orchestrated network by the use of AI. I think that's kind of the. For those who are not involved in the telecommunications industry, for those of you who are users of the telecommunications industry, you're going to have advantage of experiences and applications and services that we've been talking about in this podcast. And that is an incredibly exciting future because productivity changes connectivity all the time, where you need it, when you need it, the services you need to be provided to your, to your workforce, to your retail outlets. All of these experiences change dramatically.

You just got me excited, right, Talking about productivity and connectivity. I think those are things that we all, you know, want more of, Right. We want to be connected more to people, to business opportunities, and just to use AI to be more productive. So, Ronnie, today's conversation was extremely valuable. So I wanted to thank you so much for taking your time out to come on the Everyday AI Show. We appreciate your time.

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Really appreciate it.

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