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.

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.

TEN: Resonance

“When Bill Dally wasn’t flying his plane, or applying for a patent, or reinventing the computer, he was riding his bicycle to the point of collapse, or rowing in Lake Tahoe, or competing in a downhill ski race, or sailing nonstop from Grenada to Antigua. Dally’s pace of invention made Kirk and Nickolls look lazy: he was the author of 250 technical papers and 4 textbooks, and he held 120 patents spanning an eclectic range of computing domains, ranging from complex circuit architectures to the chip that ran the power supply.

“Catanzaro was convinced the solution was to redesign the microchip anew. He cofounded the UC-Berkeley Parallel Computing Lab in the mid-2000s, along with several colleagues. There, Catanzaro made a list of existing parallel applications. The business problem, he could see, was that even for the supposedly hungriest customers, the demand for computing power was capped: once you sold an oil prospector a supercomputer, you saturated demand for years. What you needed, Catanzaro figured, was an application that was so hungry for computation that it could never be satisfied. You needed another application like 3D graphics that demanded more computer power once its initial needs were fulfilled. Eventually, Catanzaro deduced what had to be parallel computing’s killer app. “The answer to that was AI,” Catanzaro said. “I came to AI from the bottom up. I came from a circuits perspective. I felt it was just inevitable that AI was the most important computational workload.

SEVENTEEN: Money

“Like many firms, Nvidia allowed employees to purchase stock at a discount to market prices. What set Nvidia’s program apart was that employees were allowed to purchase stock at a discount to the lowest price at any point in the last two years. These purchases were capped at a certain dollar amount, but as the stock went vertical, the program basically turned into free money, and those who maxed out their contributions each year made the trade of a lifetime. With the windfall extending deep into middle management, some newer employees expressed concerns that the nouveau-riche veterans were entering a state of “semiretirement.” Executives disputed this characterization. Jeff Fisher, who ran the company’s gaming side, had been among the first thirty employees. “Many of us are financial volunteers at this point,” he said, “but we believe in the mission.”

The lure of developing this revolutionary technology offered purpose beyond what money could buy. This was especially true of the old guard, who’d spent years explaining to baffled peers why they were working for a gaming company and who constantly had to correct the pronunciation of the firm’s name. AI had not been a consideration for these veterans, and they were as surprised to be working on it as anybody. “There was no way me, or anybody else, could have dreamed at the time that this stuff that science fiction writers might come up with has become a reality,” said Jay Puri, Nvidia’s head of sales, who started work at the company in 2005. The value of Puri’s shares exceeded $700 million by 2024, but he felt that the interesting work at Nvidia was only beginning. “Maybe I’m biased, but I think it really is the most important technology company of our time,” he said.