The New Yorker Radio Hour
Why the Tech Giant Nvidia May Own the Future. Plus, Joshua Rothman on Taking A.I Seriously
Fri, 4 Apr 2025
The microchip maker Nvidia is a Silicon Valley colossus. After years as a runner-up to Intel and Qualcomm, Nvidia has all but cornered the market on the parallel processors essential for artificial-intelligence programs like ChatGPT. “Nvidia was there at the beginning of A.I.,” the tech journalist Stephen Witt tells David Remnick. “They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of A.I. as a software revolution, something called neural nets, but A.I. is also a hardware revolution.” In The New Yorker, Stephen Witt profiled Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s brilliant and idiosyncratic co-founder and C.E.O. His new book is “The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip.” Until recently, Nvidia was the most valuable company in the world, but its stock price has been volatile, posting the largest single-day loss in history in January. But the company’s story is only partially a business story; it’s also one about global superpowers, and who will decide the future. If China takes military action against Taiwan, as it has indicated it might, the move could wrest control of the manufacturing of Nvidia microchips from a Taiwanese firm, which is now investing in a massive production facility in the U.S. “Maybe what’s happening,” Witt speculates, is that “this kind of labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn’t matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is, you know, is there enough power to supply it?” Plus, the staff writer Joshua Rothman has long been fascinated with A.I.—he even interviewed its “godfather,” Geoffrey Hinton, for The New Yorker Radio Hour. But Rothman has become increasingly concerned about a lack of public and political debate over A.I.—and about how thoroughly it may transform our lives. “Often, if you talk to people who are really close to the technology, the timelines they quote for really reaching transformative levels of intelligence are, like, shockingly soon,” he tells Remnick. “If we’re worried about the incompetence of government, on whatever side of that you situate yourself, we should worry about automated government. For example, an A.I. decides the length of a sentence in a criminal conviction, or an A.I. decides whether you qualify for Medicaid. Basically, we’ll have less of a say in how things go and computers will have more of a say.”Rothman’s essay “Are We Taking A.I. Seriously Enough?” appears in his weekly column, Open Questions.
Chapter 1: What makes Nvidia a tech giant?
And just recently, it was rated the most valuable company ever. But this is not primarily a business story. It's a story about the United States and China, about who exactly is building the technology that shapes the future, our future. About a year ago, journalist Stephen Witt wrote a stunning portrait in The New Yorker of NVIDIA and its co-founder, Jensen Huang.
Witt's new book on the subject is called The Thinking Machine. Stephen, in all the years we've been doing this show, I don't think we've ever sat down to talk about a microchip company and the CEO of that microchip company. And yet, NVIDIA is incredibly important to all of our futures in some way or another. Explain what NVIDIA is and why it's so important.
Chapter 2: How did Nvidia become crucial for AI?
When you interact with a system like ChatGPT, like say everyone's rendering their image right now as Studio Ghibli kind of anime, it takes your request and it sends it back through a giant broadband data pipe to a huge data center. And inside that data center is a warehouse full of computing equipment, all of which is running NVIDIA microchips. It's all running NVIDIA hardware.
Your request is processed there and then sent back to you in the form of an image or a term paper or a meme or a medical diagnosis or whatever you asked for. NVIDIA was there at the beginning of AI. They really kind of made these systems work for the first time. We think of AI as a software revolution, something called neural nets. But AI is also a hardware revolution.
And these microchips that NVIDIA designed used a process called parallel computing. which meant that they split mathematical problems up into a bunch of bits and then solved them all at once.
Now, it turned out, and nobody expected this, nobody saw this coming, this software, the neural networks, and this hardware, the parallel computing, worked perfectly together, and they needed each other to succeed. And this is really what made the AI revolution possible.
So what you're telling me, there would be no artificial intelligence, certainly not on this level, not on this mass level, even in its early days now, without NVIDIA and without the product they produce.
Without NVIDIA, we would be about 10 years behind on AI. The first AI system that we really would consider a modern AI system, so kind of like the Wright Brothers airplane of AI, was a system that a guy built in his bedroom, a guy named Alex Kraszewski working at the University of Toronto. And what was that? That was in 2011 and 2012.
In 2012, he built this system and he used two NVIDIA gaming cards, like the ones you would buy at Best Buy, retail video game cards to make essentially a jerry-rigged low-budget supercomputer to run the training for this neural net. And this broke all the barriers in AI.
So as a result, all of the early AI pioneers and scientists gravitated to the NVIDIA ecosystem and built all of modern AI around it.
So tell me about the origins of NVIDIA and its co-founder, Jensen Huang.
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Chapter 3: What innovations did Jensen Huang bring to Nvidia?
And once they've learned how to do that, he's going to download those brains and stick them into kind of real-world machines, and they're going to move around. I think he thinks this is in the five- to ten-year time frame, although it's already starting to happen with automobiles and other kind of like more primitive robots.
Okay, this is what we really have to break down, his vision of the world that he's seeing five years down the road. What is life going to be like in his terms? What is the world that he's seeing?
So Jensen hates science fiction. And in fact, has never read a science fiction book, he told me. I think what he's seeing today is that within the next five years, well, first, almost all sorts of entertainment will be intermediated by AI. So anything you see on a screen is going to be enhanced or passed through some kind of AI filter on the fly. What does that mean?
You know, so if I'm talking to you and I'm feeling that my face isn't looking that great today, it's going to be sort of very subtly turn on the Facetune thing to make me look better. You know, my voice will maybe sound a little different. I mean, these systems are already in place, but they're going to get more sophisticated.
I think for stuff like planning a vacation, you're just going to ask the AI agent to go bring you back some options. You're going to see the one you like and you're going to click yes, and then it's going to do all the work. It's going to book all the flights. Okay.
For something like a medical diagnosis, I think the doctor will consult with kind of an AI avatar and return with a perfect diagnosis. And then moving forward into the future, Jensen currently is trying to train robots on more difficult tasks, like washing dishes without breaking them. I think probably they're going to have something like that online within the next two or three years.
And you can imagine demand for something like that will be pretty substantial.
The dishwashing robot?
Oh, yeah. So Fei-Fei Li at Stanford did a survey of thousands of people, and she asked them one question. How much would you benefit if a robot did this for you? At the bottom of the list was opening presents. So nobody... Nobody wants a robot to open their presents for them.
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Chapter 4: What are the potential societal impacts of AI?
I think it's going, they think it's going to be at least a multi-trillion dollar industry. And Jensen wants to be right in the middle of it. He wants to build that thing's brain.
That's where AI is going?
That's where he thinks AI is going. Dishwashing. I mean, think about it. It's a huge, it's a huge market. I mean, it's going everywhere. But the consumer home use, the thing that people, when you ask them, what do you really want a robot for? They say, God, you know, it's nice not to wash the dishes anymore. Right.
And what jobs will be eliminated other than those?
All of them? I mean, this is the question that I kind of put to Jensen. Like, I can't imagine, David, what we're going to do. I mean, I think maybe like live theater.
I guess we'll play video games with little triangles.
Yeah, we'll play video games or we'll interact with the AI or maybe like in-person events, live theater will suddenly be more exciting. Maybe that's going to happen. You're making me glad that soon I'll be dead. Well, and it's funny because this question has absolutely split the AI community. Jensen is an optimist. He thinks this is the greatest thing since the invention of electricity.
And in fact, this is a comparison.
Not just the amelioration of labor, the elimination of labor.
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Chapter 5: How does Jensen Huang view the future of AI and robotics?
But it confirmed his own prejudices and vision.
In fact, Arthur C. Clarke was optimistic, too. This was the really surprising thing. Well, up to a point. Things don't end well.
Things don't end well in that movie, as I recall.
You know, Jensen was like, I have never read an Arthur C. Clarke book. His exact phrase was, I didn't read those effing books. I mean, except he swore. He just was not having it. He's completely candid. No BS. Absolutely speaks his mind. And this is really rare for a tech CEO. Where is politics? None.
He's not in that kind of right-leaning libertarian Silicon Valley camp.
Jensen was the most powerful figure in Silicon Valley not to attend Trump's inauguration. As far as I can tell, he has never made a political donation or taken a political stance in his life to a candidate.
Because he wants to avoid this or because he doesn't have politics at all?
I think he thinks politics is tribal and irrational. We're talking about an engineer. We're talking about a guy who moves forward from data and who reasons forward from data and is willing to change his mind wherever the data takes him. That's just not how politics works.
I'm talking with Stephen Witt. His new book about NVIDIA is called The Thinking Machine. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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Chapter 6: What are the contrasting views on AI between Jensen Huang and Geoffrey Hinton?
I think so. It seems like the results are legit. You know, and NVIDIA was the most valuable corporation on earth. And so it's going to have these kind of wild swings. For a long time, all of his manufacturing came from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation.
They're the ones who really, the only ones who had the capability to build these advanced microchips so they would outsource production to Taiwan. Why couldn't he bring it here? Because Taiwanese engineers work 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week, and they're incredibly dedicated and incredibly gifted, computers kind of segmented into almost two spheres.
All of the hardware was going to be built in Asia, and all the software was going to be built in Silicon Valley. And, you know, each side was just going to pursue its kind of competitive advantage. And that's unchangeable. It was unchangeable. Now, with Trump, it's starting to look a lot different. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation is coming to the U.S.
They're making the single largest foreign direct investment in the history of the United States. And they're building this incredibly huge factory on the outskirts of Phoenix where it's so hot that they have to put ice in the concrete to pour it so that it sets. The thing they're building out there is huge. It looks like an airport.
And once they're done, it will probably be capable of doing most of the manufacturing for NVIDIA. And in fact, NVIDIA is banned from selling its most advanced equipment to China.
Now, maybe what's happening is that people are starting to say, hey, this kind of like labor advantage that Asia had over the United States for a long time, maybe in the age of robots, that labor advantage is going to go away. And then it doesn't matter where we put the factory. The only thing that matters is if, you know, is there enough power to supply it?
And is there any geopolitical risk involved? And so in an age where robots are doing most of the work in the factory, I think the calculus of globalization and offshoring starts to look very different.
Is he ultimately interested in bolting Taiwan to avoid the potential specter of China taking over Taiwan in one form or another?
Jensen loves Taiwan. He loves it. It's where he was born. He speaks Taiwanese natively. He goes back all the time, and he's a folk hero there. He's in the night markets buying food, just like a normal guy.
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