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.

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.

Kirk ran many of the hiring interviews. Years earlier, at his own start-up, he’d been forced to lay off a hundred engineers, an experience so painful that days later he himself had quit. Resolved never to repeat this experience,

Kirk determined that the best way to avoid layoffs was to be selective about whom he hired. The initial interview format at Nvidia consisted of several rounds of interviews, followed by a consensus hiring decision. But the technical staff, reluctant to make people squirm, stuck to standard interview bullshit: “Recall a time you overcame adversity,” “What’s your greatest

weakness?,” “Why are manhole covers round?”

Kirk, frustrated, felt that his staff were wasting time. He knew how Jensen would respond: by gathering the technical staff in a conference room and screaming at them. Like Diercks, Kirk believed that Huang’s outbursts were purposeful. “Yelling at people was part of this motivational strategy,” Kirk said. “You might think he’s just mad, but I think it was premeditated.

And it works! It annoys people, but it does work.” The audience, Kirk believed, was crucial: “He wants everybody to benefit. He would never just yell at some guy in the hall. When he’s torturing people, he’s forcing them to learn a lesson—and they certainly would never forget it.

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.