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.

The experience was liberating for Huang. Desperation, not inspiration, was the mother of victory. Huang encouraged his employees to preserve the mindset they’d adopted during the Riva crunch, asking them to constantly behave as if the company was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy even when it was making massive profits. For years to come, Jensen opened staff presentations with the words “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” Even today at Nvidia, this sentence remains the corporate mantra.

Garlick took the job and remained at Nvidia for the next seventeen years. “My theory is that Jensen is a good person at heart who had to be ruthless,” Garlick said. “As opposed to some other CEOs, who were ruthless at heart and trying to pretend to be good people.” Such were Huang’s charms that, out of the 120 employees he recruited, 106 joined the dark side.

With the new hires, Nvidia had more than six hundred employees, up from just thirty-five four years earlier. The company relocated to a new headquarters down the road in Santa Clara, leasing a complex of curved, multistory, glass-and-steel buildings joined by skyways, festooned with sculpture, surrounded by parking, adjacent to the expressway, and spread across eleven acres of land. The new offices didn’t smell like takeout food. They didn’t smell like anything. Modernist respectability, with its boring and predictable implications, had arrived.

Huang did not have a concrete vision of what the future of technology would look like. Some technologists did; for example, Elon Musk began with a vision of himself standing on the surface of Mars, then worked backward to build the technology he would need to get himself there. Huang went in the opposite direction; he started with the capabilities of the circuits sitting in front of him, then projected forward as far as logic would allow. Only there, at the frontier of reason, would he allow himself to take a single step forward into the nebulous realm of vibes.