The Thinking Machine - Stephen Witt

Introduction:

“This is the story of how a niche vendor of video game hardware became the most valuable company in the world. It is the story of a stubborn entrepreneur who pushed his radical vision for computing for thirty years, in the process becoming one of the wealthiest men alive. It is the story of a revolution in silicon and the small group of renegade engineers who defied Wall Street to make it happen. And it is the story of the birth of an awesome and terrifying new category of artificial intelligence, whose long-term implications for the human species cannot be known. At the center of this story is a propulsive, mercurial, brilliant, and extraordinarily dedicated man. His name is Jensen Huang, and his thirty-two-year tenure is the longest of any technology CEO in the S&P 500.

Huang is a visionary inventor whose familiarity with the inner workings of electronic circuitry approaches a kind of intimacy. He reasons from first principles about what microchips can do today, then gambles with great conviction on what they will do tomorrow.

Of course, Huang would work hard anyway. It is in his nature. If there is a theme to his life, it is amplification; he has executed on the same simple precepts of diligence, courage, and mastery of fundamentals again and again and again, to greater and greater effect. I was surprised to learn how much of the man he later became was present in the immigrant child arriving unaccompanied by his parents in the United States in 1973 to an environment so unconducive to flourishing that it seems a miracle he survived it. To understand Huang fully, we begin not at Denny’s restaurant, nor in the giant cathedrals of technology he later commissioned, but at this tiny rural school.

The product was known as a “graphics accelerator,” and at least thirty-five competitors were trying to build one. Huang worried there was no space for a thirty-sixth. The leading expert in computer graphics was Jon Peddie, who had written several textbooks on the topic. Huang had reached out to Peddie to get a sense of the market, and the two soon became friends, with Huang calling incessantly, asking questions late into the night. Peddie advised Huang that the space was too crowded and that many of the best engineers were already working for other start-ups. “I told him not to do it,” Peddie said. “That was the best advice he never took.

Huang had managed to stay ahead of his competitors so far, but his asset-light “merchant” business was essentially just a collection of engineers sitting around a Silicon Valley office park. If those engineers weren’t constantly developing new, difficult-to-replicate technology,

manufacturers in Asia would start knocking off his chips, and Nvidia would cease to exist. “If we don’t reinvent computer graphics, if we don’t reinvent ourselves, and we don’t open the canvas for the things that we can do on this processor, we will be commoditized out of existence,” Huang later said. Not to gamble was the biggest risk of all.

NINE: Cuda

“To distinguish himself, Huang had to pursue a strategy that so defied conventional business logic that ATI wouldn’t follow. He had to build an exploratory product, like a $300 entry-level scientific supercomputer that not only didn’t have competitors but also didn’t even have obvious customers. The zero-billion-dollar market, by definition, was one that only he would participate in—one that only he would even see. Huang was going to build a baseball diamond in a cornfield and wait for the players to arrive.