Nvidia Wouldn't Exist If CEO Could Turn the Clock Back 30 Years
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
Creative immersive experiences, across the history of computing, are computationally expensive. The better computing gets, the more (visually at least) immersive the experience. The search for photo realism is an asymptotic search to compute a convincing simulacrum of reality. So much human nature drove the tip of that spear forward.
Immersion itself implies some kind of tricking of the consciousness, blending the familiar with the novel. Instructions and ideas piped into a machine that generates images. GPUs are specialized in parallel computation because that's precisely the architecture that best performs the multi-modal magic trick.
It's surprising to me how incredulous people seem about the possibility of creating a sentient machine that is fed off a large enough diet of human written material. Language is crystalized consciousness. It's the primary medium we use to communicate our inner experience to the outside. What other fuel would you use?
The human brain is so much more than language.
The fact that we can take ideas and serialize them into language doesn't mean the language and the ideas are the same thing. They become ideas again when we deserialize them into our minds.
Language models can't do that (something else more complex could, but then it would not be just a language model).
Also slowing down AI is that:
1) We don't presently know that much about the human brain or psychology. A lot, yes, but relatively not that much.
2) The scientific method is systematic, not systemic. Both perspectives are needed to interpret a reality made of interconnected systems.
3) There are many specialists and not many generalists. Generalists are needed to tie together the multiple domains required to emulate the human brain.
If video games didn't exist and instead we had found some extremely valuable ore that could only be mined by performing lots of hash calculations (so like bitcoin, but actually valuable), machine learning would have developed on miner asics, and then people would be telling stories about how of course sentient machines could only come from hashing numbers together because hashing is what our brain does or whatever.
A lot of the numerical methods we use to solve hard problems are based on solutions to linear problems (or quadratic problems if we’re taking derivatives) that predate computer graphics because those problems are simple to solve. We can just solve them a lot faster now so approximating nonlinear things with linear things iteratively becomes a lot more computationally tractable.
That's a pretty big claim. I disagree with it, but I agree about the idea of language models being a fundamental part of an artificial mind. Language is like the TCP/IP of ideas, we put data into it, and then extract data from it.
But the language and the data we extract from it are two different things, IMO.
The commentary is missing the context of the sunken cost problem.
This CEO, like many others, already paid his dues. He's missed many bdays, wrecked his health, and lost relationships. And now he gets to enjoy the benefits of the hard work, with the company is firing in all cylinders.
Walking away now would mean all the sacrifice was for nothing.
He's got a family friends, and one of the world's largest and most succesful companies.
Many of us have made similar sacrifices without being CEOs. A few lucky ones have even saved enough to be able to escape that lifestyle.
> And now he gets to enjoy the benefits of the hard work, with the company is firing in all cylinders.
What are those benefits?
He is already wealthy beyond imagination. He could stop any time and enjoy a life of luxuries that we can hardly imagine.
Beyond wealth, he has a legacy. In the industry he will be remembered as a highly influential figure and pioneer.
> Walking away now would mean all the sacrifice was for nothing.
How so? What were his goals when he started? Has he not achieved everything that he wanted and more?
Here's what I think happens to people like these who don't quit when they are already wealthy: they like what they have and they fear losing it.
They like feeling in power, respected by their peers and subordinates, they like feeling important, accomplished, even admired.
And, I suspect, they fear quitting because they realize that once they quit, they are just another bored rich dude with a estranged spouse and children. A has-been with too much free time who will forever try to talk about his past accomplishments to people who don't care.
Unless they reinvent themselves like Gates, but many seem to get stuck in the founder/entrepreneur mindset and start yet another company, never having learned their lesson.
If you watch the video he actually answered that question. Infinite ambitions. They started a journey, a mission, a goal and it is still not reached.
Not everyone is Steve Jobs, or maybe this guy. Most people probably aren't, and just get lucky/have dedicated staff that can work around bad choices from leadership.
They are at best managers, not entrepreneur or founders.
>Not everyone is Steve Jobs, or maybe this guy.
His name is Jensen Huang, mostly know as Jensen. I know HN isn't exactly a place for hardware. To the point it is worst than most hardware forums. But not even mentioning or knowing Nvidia's CEO's name is just on another level.
YouTube: https://youtu.be/y6NfxiemvHg?si=FpfBRSVNRQk8ebjb
Spotify: https://spotify.link/kP791sg35Db
It is really easy to get disheartened by modern C suite culture and the players.
This interview showed the other side. A great thinker and leader who appears to deserve any accolade bestowed upon him.
Why so binary? Like any person, he's probably great but also in some parts not.
But have you listened to that interview?
It was just refreshing compared to normal CEO speak / mythology / ego.
And from what I see in the comments here, a lot of people are misunderstanding the point.
If Jensen, Thiel, or Levchin fully understood the challenges they'd face to get their companies off the ground, they would never have pursued it. That's not to say they regret the results.
For better or worse, they all persevered, and so it's easy for us to say, well yeah, obviously that was the right move. Because PayPal and Nvidia are obvious slam dunks in retrospect. But none of us have been there, as pioneers of the unproven, and it's the height of arrogance to contradict that.
The PATRIOT act (and others) was passed by congress, who wasn't then voted out of office by the electorate. So I don't think Palantir is really any more complicit than "the American people".
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp
There is a reason we spend two billion dollars a day on the US military whilst not at war and it has nothing to do with “the people” who are mostly struggling to make rent and afford groceries whilst working constantly without healthcare.
Most Americans don’t vote (but are forced to pay taxes to fund these things) so assuming their will without data is spurious at best and actively misleading at worst.
If you vote, but not for those people, and those people win anyway, well... that's how democracy works.
That description covers all of the candidates.
This is the central lie/blame assignment of democracy, and it is plainly false on its face. How can someone totally uninvolved in a process be in any way whatsoever responsible for the outcome of that process?
You also go on to refute it yourself in the next paragraph.
On that, we are in agreement: there is no fundamental problem with the state that can be fixed by voting. Voting legitimizes the fraudulent and coercive system; abstaining is a vote for its invalidity. More people consider the system invalid than participate in it.
I think political posts should be empty if more people abstain from voting than vote for any single candidate.
What kind of challenges is that? I'm genuinely curious. I don't particularly see the job of an entrepreneur as difficult. Not in the sense that it's easy to be successful, but in the sense that it's laborious, painful, sufferable, miserable, relentless, etc.
For example, I'd consider medical surgeon a pretty difficult career. Years of study and practice. 24h+ shifts. Dealing with life and death on a consistent basis.
So I'm interested what are the kinds of hardships faced by entrepreneurs that get them to say that?
Someone you don't forget
No one knows what they're doing when they are just starting out. This is just dumb.
Cash out your XXbn and buy your dream house already!
Is it just the stress of it all? Negotiating the deals, worrying you're going to lose it all, all your money, and be left with nothing?
I get how it could be possible to be stuck can be on the hamster wheel asking yourself this question over and over for a lifetime chasing fulfillment.
However, the guy is worth $35b+...
> If the above sounds somewhat negative, Huang's tone in this part of the interview isn't really regretful but more like an impassive observer. He wouldn't willingly follow the whole journey again, saying, "I think it's too much. It is just too much." He references feelings like pain, suffering, shame, and embarrassment.
I don't doubt there was fear of failure along the way/close calls, lots of risk and potential/actual cases for shame, etc.
I just don't get why he isn't speaking from a position of fulfillment... it's ironic obviously. Why discuss shame when you have so much success to point to?
Then again, if he would've said "There were times I felt shame along the way but overall it's been amazing and I'd totally do it again", we wouldn't be here reading the article/headline/comments about it...
Saying "if I could take it all back and undo all of the success I've achieved and lives I've touched, I wouldn't do it because it wasn't worth it" seems a bit more than politely humble to me.
Any new announcement features a video of him making the announcement. They’re more CEO focused than Jobs lead Apple was.
And if the author is particularly respected and well spoken, even more silly to not squeeze that asset for all its juice
It’s not a general statement. He’s not giving advice.
Your problem is you cannot conceive that once upon a time he had no more than you. But now he is in a different place. Can you not conceive how and why you would get there yourself? Because if you did, I'm pretty sure you'd phrase this comment in a different manner.
Who are these people who don't know how to put on pants while sitting on a floor/bed/chair/etc.?
That is a great point about the neologism. If you're sitting down you can put your pants on two legs at a time. However, there's something quite "everyman" about putting your pants on standing up, because you can do it anywhere.
Inside a bathroom? One pants leg at a time. Getting kicked out of someone else's home barely clothed because "someone else" got home? One leg at a time, albeit at a quicker pace. True, putting on pants two legs at a time from a sitting position is ideal, but it is a luxury.
I imagine one might be in a sitting position there as well.
Generally speaking people who end up super rich do have more than most people when they start. It's much easier to go from rich to super rich than it is to go from poor to super rich.
Why are you saying the word "generally" when you know, or should know, that the specific person is Jensen Huang, whose biography you could easily look up [1]?
It makes no sense to say "It's much easier to go from rich to super rich than it is to go from poor to super rich" when you're talking about someone who obviously grew up poor -- except to make a pet point that is completely inapplicable to the subject at hand.
It's fine to want to make it but I think you'd get more mileage from that point if you placed it in a discussion about a more applicable subject personality.
[1] https://english.cw.com.tw/article/article.action?id=3442
MSEE from Stanford though... so he probably had student loan debt. ;-)
That on its own seems like a very mixed blessing.
On one hand, you never have to worry about money.
On the other hand, you will always have to worry about your money.
Either way, essentially what he seems to be saying is that it wasn't really worth it. After all, $35b isn't really what makes life worth living for most of us.
I have less than a billion dollars, and yet I worry about money a lot.
Curious.
You'd just worry about different aspects of money. How not to lose what you have, how you will be constantly approached by grifters, how to keep yourself and your family safe.
Different issues, but still worry and still about money. IMO once you're past a certain level it's a lot more about mindset than about what you actually have, right up until you truly stand out from the crowd.
Being poor sucks and being rich is nice, but being ultra-rich like that is a bit like being a popstar, where things like going out to a shopping centre or having a normal social life become impossible.