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.

TWO: Large-Scale Integration

“When LSI’s customers wanted new functions, most of the designers would simply respond, “There’s no way.” Huang would say, “Let me see what I can do.”

Huang would spend hours fiddling with the simulator, attempting to arrange the list of components to enable what the customer wanted. This was painstaking work, conducted without the assistance of graphical user interfaces or even color monitors. His focus was admirable, but Horstmann knew many engineers who could become similarly absorbed in technical problems; what set Huang apart was his ability to avoid dead ends. “Similar people, they get lost, right?” Horstmann said. “They just get lost in these deep, deep ratholes. He doesn’t. He has a great sense of seeing when a problem has reached a certain level of complexity, and he can’t easily make further progress, and he has to go in a different direction.”

LSI’s most demanding customers were the computer-graphics designers, whose appetite for faster silicon knew no point of satiation. To serve them, Horstmann, with Huang’s encouragement, began signing contracts to deliver products that, internally, the two had no idea if LSI could actually make. Older engineers advised the two to be more cautious. Do you know what you’re doing? they’d say. If this fails, it may be the end of your career. “It was true, but that never troubled us,” Horstmann said. Almost everything Horstmann and Huang promised was eventually delivered.

FIVE: Going Parallel

“Kirk and Huang each combined a commanding breadth of technical expertise with a talent for low cunning. As Nvidia succeeded, many of the other graphics start-ups failed. Huang, sensing opportunity, created a master list of competitors on the whiteboard in his office. Then, in consultation with Kirk, he identified the two or three best engineers at each company and began strategizing on how to poach them.

Kirk recalled showing off the Riva 128 to a competitor at a trade show. When the engineer saw what it could do, he gave up on the spot. “I hired him within a few days—and that killed that company, right?” Kirk said. “Because, you know, I removed its brain.” Kirk, mild and professorial, had a predator’s instincts. “We had all the geniuses from all the other start-ups, and as we were successful in overtaking more and more of these little companies, the remaining companies had a harder and harder time staying alive.

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.

Two fringe strains of computer science, starved of investment, hated—no, detested—by industry and researchers alike had somehow unified to form a thriving, sprawling entity now careering toward sentience. “I just thought, there is no way that Nvidia is this lucky,” Aarts said. “There’s no way that deep learning just fits this perfectly because Nvidia has never put any effort into it!”

Huang called it “luck, founded by vision.”

For Dally, it was Huang’s tireless work ethic that made Nvidia succeed. Even Dally, who left no spare second in his day, could not quite believe the superhuman efforts of his boss. “The rest of us are just here to reduce the bandwidth demands on Jensen,” Dally said. “I mean, when does he sleep?” Diercks agreed: “His hobbies are work, email, and work.”

Plenty of people worked long hours, though. Jens Horstmann attributed Huang’s success to his adaptability. “I’ve often asked myself, how is it that we started in the same cubicle, you know, with a similar IQ, both working equally hard,” Horstmann said. “How is it that this person not only built this amazing company, but also a network around him of people that—that would just die for him if needed?” Huang, Horstmann believed, had changed himself many times. He recalled Huang at LSI, pushing the simulation software to its outer limits. “Now, he’s still doing the same thing, but what he’s engineering is himself. He was not born as a great CEO; he was not destined to be one. He transformed himself into one, just by abstracting! Just by problem-solving the inputs and outputs of what a good CEO should be.