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.

Of course, Huang would work hard anyway. It is in his nature. If there is a theme to his life, it is amplification; he has executed on the same simple precepts of diligence, courage, and mastery of fundamentals again and again and again, to greater and greater effect. I was surprised to learn how much of the man he later became was present in the immigrant child arriving unaccompanied by his parents in the United States in 1973 to an environment so unconducive to flourishing that it seems a miracle he survived it. To understand Huang fully, we begin not at Denny’s restaurant, nor in the giant cathedrals of technology he later commissioned, but at this tiny rural school.

THREE: New Venture

“Sun Microsystems had declined to pursue the consumer marketplace for PC video game hardware. So had Lori’s former employer Silicon Graphics, the industry leader in three-dimensional graphics. (Employees there were busy animating the CGI dinosaurs for Jurassic Park.) The failure of the major players to invest in PC gaming created a vacuum in the marketplace, which a brigade of start-up businesses was now scrambling to fill.

The concept was to take the hardware used to paint the wire-frame skeletons of model airplanes and dinosaurs and repurpose it to create controllable animated figures in three-dimensional games.

TWENTY-ONE: Jensen

“Jensen contradicted himself frequently, sometimes offering opposing viewpoints within the same interview. He wasn’t playing devil’s advocate, exactly—he just liked to attack ideas from both sides. “He’s not trying to be a politician,” Horstmann said. “He’s not trying to stay on message. He’s trying to process real-time input, and he’s willing to entertain a contradictory thought for a while.” What might appear to be a definitive pronouncement was often just Jensen thinking out loud. Only once he started to repeat himself was it time to pay attention. When an idea really struck Jensen, it slowly built up steam over a period of days or even weeks. It cycled into his vocabulary and was repeated at every meeting. Concepts like the “zero-billion-dollar market” or the “speed of light” hadn’t come to Jensen in a flash; they’d arrived as polished nuggets of wisdom after spending months being tossed in the rock tumbler of his mind. Having arrived, they were then drilled so thoroughly into his employees that his staff sometimes sounded like characters from The Manchurian Candidate, repeating Jensen’s catchphrases verbatim with a glassy look in their eyes. Even employees who hadn’t worked at Nvidia for years could still recite the catechism from memory.

TWENTY-TWO: The Fear

“When I shared Jensen’s objections with Bengio, he grew agitated. “Of course, there is no data!” he said. “Humanity hasn’t disappeared yet! Are we going to wait until we have repeated the death of humanity multiple times to decide that, oh, now we have data?!” He made a good point. All the data in the world would not have predicted the breakthrough of AlexNet or the success of the transformer architecture. Twice in ten years, AI had experienced unforeseeable and permanent upgrades to its capabilities. Bengio did not think that the current models posed an immediate threat to human life—but what about the next breakthrough? No one could say what it might bring or when it might happen.