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.

He could talk extemporaneously for more than two hours at a time, and in these presentations he would often revisit the same themes: the importance of the “speed of light” scheduling concept, the pursuit of the fabled “zero-billion-dollar market,” and above all, the ever-present danger of creeping bureaucracy.

This elegant architecture, designed to do the simplest thing conceivable—just take one step at a time—was like a skeleton key for AI. In 2017 the team published its results in the Neural Information Processing Systems journal, which had published the original AlexNet results. The paper needed a name, so Jones, channeling the Beatles, suggested “Attention Is All You Need.” This was an off-the-cuff joke that he didn’t think the team would actually use. Later, he would meet people with the sentence tattooed on their arms.

Firms that attempted to replicate GPT with in-house data often produced shambolic “knowledge engines” that were little better than toys. These AIs supplemented the standard large-language-model training set with emails, mission statements, patent applications, legal memoranda, and other exciting selections from the internal corporate syllabus. As the buzz percolated through middle management, executives at marketing, media, and health-care firms launched ambitious initiatives, sometimes openly telling staff that many employees would be laid off once the neural nets were working. But much of what was produced was vaporware: late, expensive, and barely functional. Many users felt that AI technology simply

wasn’t ready.

TWENTY-THREE: The Thinking Machine

“Looking back, it became clear to me that Jensen had wanted to lose his temper; he’d made a conscious decision to thrash me. Once the performance had started, his fury was genuine, but it was all in service of a larger point he wanted to make. It wasn’t just that Jensen didn’t read science fiction—it was that he actually hated science fiction. He was a

serious man.

The reason that Jensen had succeeded in fields where others had failed—parallel computing, AI, the Omniverse—was precisely because he didn’t tolerate airy speculation about the future. He examined technologies coldly, from first principles, swayed neither by optimism nor fear but only by a cold and patient sense of business logic that he alone could push to the outer limits of corporate foresight. Beyond that he did not look or care to imagine. The potential for human extinction was not a question of corporate strategy and thus, to him, was as foolish as drawing a dragon on the unexplored portion of the map.