Why the Tech Giant Nvidia May Own the Future. Plus, Joshua Rothman on Taking A.I Seriously
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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.
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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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What makes Nvidia a tech giant?
1:25–2:19
2
How did Nvidia become crucial for AI?
2:19–7:01
3
What innovations did Jensen Huang bring to Nvidia?
7:01–10:02
4
What are the potential societal impacts of AI?
10:02–13:05
5
How does Jensen Huang view the future of AI and robotics?
13:05–17:07
6
What are the contrasting views on AI between Jensen Huang and Geoffrey Hinton?
17:07–34:14