The Nvidia CEO says six years ago, when no one was talking about artificial intelligence (AI), Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked him to address his Cabinet on AI.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had said a few days ago, “About 6 years ago, when I met Modi ji for the first time, he asked me to meet his cabinet and address them about artificial intelligence.” He made this comment during a recent conversation with Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani in Mumbai.

He added, “I was very surprised.” “This was literally the first time that a government leader had asked me to address his Cabinet on this particular topic (AI).”

Nvidia’s CEO says he was surprised to be asked by the Prime Minister to address Cabinet because “it’s been a long time since anyone was talking about artificial intelligence”.

Huang also revealed that during his last visit to India, PM Modi had said something ‘very deep’ to him. Modi told him that it makes complete sense that India should build its own AI instead of outsourcing data to import intelligence.

Nvidia CEO expressed the same view in a recent conversation with India Today. In one question he was asked how India can avoid being relegated to a back-office role in the new world driven by AI. He said that India needs to stop providing its labor for software development done elsewhere. “Why export labor when the software is made somewhere else? Why not build the intelligence here and then export it,” Huang said.

Nvidia CEO proposes that India should prioritize developing and exporting its own AI innovations, aiming to establish itself as a leader in AI development and not just serve as a support center , as it did during the IT boom.

“You have the data, the energy and the infrastructure. You have the critical elements in the country to be able to collect raw data and turn it into intelligence,” he said. “There are many Indians who would enjoy Hindi on their phones everywhere around the world. Those tokens should be manufactured here (India). That intelligence should be manufactured here.”

During his visit to India, the Nvidia CEO also introduced a new Hindi AI model called Nemotron-4-mini-Hindi-4B, which is designed to enable Indian companies to build their own AI models.