Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
mjr00 | on: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's letter to staff about affair
Not to sound too negative but IMO NVidia has largely been "right place, right time" and I don't think Huang has had much to do with it. NVidia made computer graphics cards and CUDA long ago; they just happened to be in the right place, twice, in quick succession: first crypto/blockchain, then AI, neither of which they really had any part in boosting. It's like they set up a general store that sells pickaxes and drills, then someone found gold in the mountain right next to them, and then the goldmine ran out but someone found oil right under them.

The one big thing I will given Huang credit for is not going all-in on blockchain and recognizing it as a bubble. NVidia never really pivoted from their core business/customers to support crypto miners, unlike what they're doing with AI.

solyin | parent | next
There were a lot of computer graphics cards manufacturers back in the 90's. Nvidia survived amongst the whole pack of them. 3dfx, Matrox, S3, ATI, Cirrus. How much of that is soley due to Jenson vs outside factors outside of his control, only he really knows, but I think her deserves a bit more credit than right place right time. CUDA was a very expensive investment with zero guarantee of payoff. The market could have gone an entirely different way and Nvidia would have failed.
mjr00 | root | parent
That's fair. NVidia's execution has been rock solid for as long as they've been around and Huang deserves credit for that. But I would say most of the reason they've 100x'd since 2017 has been external forces.
Jlagreen | root | parent
Yes the demand of comapnies for AI compute which Nvidia delivered. These are still the external forces which let it grow at 100% YoY despite >$200b in revenue.
Kudos | root | parent
Did you forget the crypto boom?
est31 | parent | next
> first crypto/blockchain, then AI, neither of which they really had any part in boosting.

Nvidia boosts AI a lot. They are the central bank of AI. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49673098

mjr00 | root | parent
Maybe the verb tense was unclear. NVidia currently boosts AI, for obvious reasons. But OpenAI was the company who did all of the legwork to make AI into an industry, with some minor support from NVidia. NVidia wouldn't have 10x'd since 2022 without OpenAI.
est31 | root | parent
AI has been a (minor but existing) industry before OpenAI. E.g. Deepmind exists since 2010, 6 years before OpenAIs founding. Sure, OpenAI has contributed to it, in great deals, but Nvidia has always been there during the growth of AI. In 2012, AlexNet has been trained on GTX 580 GPUs, in 2016 AlphaGo used Nvidia GPUs, etc.
SXX | parent | next
To be honest other hardware companies had years to catch up to Cuda and ML, but they invested shit into their software stacks.

Even when AI boom was imminient but 10 times smaller 2-3 years ago they did not invested heavily enough and Nvidia went all in.

I have no clue what percent of that decision making was Huang, but all the competition leadership was certainly incompetent.

So at least he did built company with a good leadership. Its a fact. Even if I personally dont like Nvidia or its products.

xiaoyu2006 | parent | next
The had the insight to develop and promote CUDA long before DL was a thing. IIRC AlexNet was when CUDA really paid off.
hcta | parent | next
> they just happened to be in the right place, twice, in quick succession

that is generally what it looks like when someone is smarter than you

mjr00 | root | parent
> that is generally what it looks like when someone is smarter than you

Maybe. This is also what everyone said about Elon for a long time, though.

CamperBob2 | root | parent | next
It's not that Musk is not smart, he's just erratic, and growing increasingly so. He is the Howard Hughes of our day. They will find his body in an expensive hotel room at some point, surrounded by bottles of his own urine.
N_Lens | root | parent
Maybe that's the jetfuel we need to get to Mars.
khazhoux | root | parent
I challenge anyone who says “Elon not so smart” to name a topic in his wheelhouse that you think you can discuss in more detail than him. Because I’m certain he’d run circles around all but experts, in rocketry, auto tech, power cells, and more.

I mean: dude is smart. Everyone just wants to deny him that because he’s now an anti-immigrationist and they can’t stand the thought of him being both awful and smarter than them.

smrq | root | parent
He'd better. It would be a pretty severe embarrassment for a layman to know more than you about your own industry.

The trap he and many other smart idiots fall into is believing that having a high degree of expertise in one area qualifies you to speak authoritatively in unrelated areas. These days maybe you could call it Claude-smart: pairing situational brilliance with unwarranted confidence at other times. The really properly smart people I've met are good at tempering their statements with their degree of certainly based on their own qualifications.

khazhoux | root | parent
Sure, I agree. My beef here is with people who insist he’s a dummy when it comes even to rocketry, etc. That he only just hired people, but otherwise is not himself any sort of expert. Just lucky (over and over and over, apparently).
javier2 | parent | next
Yeah, they had been working on CUDA for a very long time before AI turned out to be interesting again.
altmanaltman | parent
Yeah, but in this case they also built the pickaxes and drills and did it better than any other pickaxe and drill builder. In your analogy, they are commodities and a shop like that can be set up by anyone. But in this case, that doesn't apply. And if you look at their sales composition, they never pivoted away from gaming, but data centers clearly became ludicrously more attractive in the AI era. But they were always very good at computing triangles, perhaps the best in the world. They were lucky that market forces made that computation very valuable but they were not lucky in their ability to build it.
mjr00 | root | parent
I do agree! They execute extremely well and Huang deserves praise for that. I just don't see him as a visionary leader shaping the industry in the same way that e.g. Jobs was. In an alternate world where the NSA doesn't create bitcoin and OpenAI is never founded, NVidia would be a stable, reliable producer of consumer electronic parts.
altmanaltman | root | parent
how can you be sure though we wont find a good use of computing triangles in that alternative universe? that technology would always have abstract value, how it is impmemented will depend on market forces but you have to admit, they know how to go with the flow, maybe to an extent where it seems like they just keep getting lucky