Jensen thinks DLSS 5 works at "the geometry level", for instance. Oh and he pays engineers $500,000 to spend $250,000 on Claude tokens.
Jensen isn't an idiot, he's capitalizing on the market.
This is true regardless of the specific jargon used, though. Or are you saying that idiot CEOs will not be impressed by correct claims only stupid claims?
All we know is he's saying things that are technically incorrect. And I'm not sure where that falls on the line of "Just Acceptable Marketing BS" to "Lying to the market about a Publicly Traded company" that would fall if he does understand it.
And while true he very much had deep technical education and roles, he's been C-level for over 30 years now. And a lot can change - both in the underlying technology and an individual's technical understanding - in 30 years.
And there is a huge difference between a CEO having "no clue" and a CEO trying to speak in terms that laymen and the business press can understand (even if a ton gets lost in translation).
But even just taking what you wrote, there is a huge difference between lying to the press to get positive coverage/hype and just being outright clueless, which is what the GP comment was asserting. I sincerely doubt Jensen Huang is clueless.
If a CEO wants to pay engineers $500,000 and then let them spend as much as they need on tools and services, I'm all for it.
Getting angry at a CEO for paying high compensation and also having a high tool use budget is not a take I expected on Hacker News.
It's an insane take. Completely bone-headed. Just obvious grift.
What he said was that if he's paying 500,000 for an engineer, he expects that engineer to spend at least 250,000 in tokens, to get the most out of those $500,000.
Basically that it would be counterproductive to hire a top tier engineer and restrict his token usage to let's say $200 or $500 a month.
I think he's right on this.
That's not what he said, though. He gave a number, and that number happens to correspond to something on the order of 25 billion Opus 4.6 tokens (hard to say what input vs. output ratio is like). He also said he is currently "deeply alarmed" if his engineers don't spend that much.
Do you think you're smart? Have you ever done something and said "man, I'm an idiot"? It's just like that.
Of course, the other explanation is that he's just grifting, which is also very possible.
Having raw intelligence doesn't help if you don't apply rigor to your thinking. I suspect that very successful people actually end up falling into habitual mental shortcuts that cause them to promote stupid things at a later time.
He's not stupid.