The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip
The Challenges of Writing a Book on the Tech Industry
A challenge of writing a book on the tech industry, especially something as rapidly evolving as artificial intelligence, is that the story will be slightly out of date in the few months between the final draft being turned in and the hardback hitting the shelves. You wish you could tell the future, but you’re stuck with what you have when you send the book to the printer.
The Rise of Nvidia
For example, Stephen Witt’s "The Thinking Machine," a lively biography of the C.E.O. Jensen Huang, whose company Nvidia makes microchips that power A.I. systems like ChatGPT, came out this spring, but it recounts events only up to a mid-2024 climactic showdown between the author and his subject over the possibility of A.I. destroying humanity, which means that a line that appears in an earlier chapter — about how Elon Musk differs from Huang in temperament — mentions that the Tesla C.E.O. has "at least" 11 children. That count is now woefully behind. By most estimates, he’s up to 14.
It also means Witt’s account doesn’t include the recent drama that arose after the release of a new A.I. chatbot from the Chinese company DeepSeek. A rival to ChatGPT, the Chinese chatbot was allegedly built for a fraction of the cost, with fewer fancy chips. This bucked the accepted wisdom that the only way to improve A.I. was to shovel vast sums of money at Nvidia to buy more and more of its hardware. When the markets absorbed this fact in January, Nvidia’s stock price tumbled.
The Story of Nvidia’s Rise
Before that fall, however, there was an astonishing rise. The story of how Nvidia became the hottest investment on Wall Street and a household name is fascinating because its trajectory differs significantly from that of its Big Tech peers. For most of the time that companies like Apple, Meta, and Amazon have been around, regular people used their products and services every day. But, unless you were a hard-core gamer, you probably hadn’t heard of Nvidia until recently.
Jensen Huang’s Early Life and Career
Huang doesn’t offer Witt much on how his upbringing may have led to his current status as a technology apex predator ("I try not to analyze myself in that way," he tells Witt), but there are early glimpses of his incredible drive and focus. In 1973, at 10 years old, he immigrated to the United States from Thailand and eventually landed in Oregon, where, between homework and shifts at Denny’s, he played competitive Ping-Pong at the national level.
Nvidia’s Early Days
By the early ’90s, popular video games like Myst and Doom were coming out and the industry around personal computing was ramping up. Like many ambitious people on the West Coast, Huang had been looking for a way to rise up through the hardware market. In 1993, instead of trying to compete against giants like Intel and Sun in the general computer chip space, Huang co-founded Nvidia, a company focused specifically on P.C. video games; their chips were robust enough to process the immersive visuals that the new games were creating.
A.I. and Nvidia’s Future
This push for extra processing power would come in handy down the line, but for much of Nvidia’s history, success was far from assured. Over 30 years, the company had ups and downs, nearly facing bankruptcy and fighting off activist investors.
Huang’s tolerance for risk pulled his company through again and again. Huang was also notorious for his management style; his trademark technique is rage and yelling. In 2008, one of the company’s new graphics chips had a design flaw that caused mass customer returns and a plunge in stock price. In front of a large group in the company cafeteria, including more than a hundred executives, Huang reamed out the chip architect responsible for the error. "I still vividly remember Jensen just nonstop berating him for a good hour and a half," an employee who was there tells Witt. "Honestly, maybe it was two hours — he was just livid."
Conclusion
It’s hard not to compare Huang with Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk and see him as a kinder, less evil version of his tech overlord peers. For all his verbal abuse, he hasn’t attempted to reshape global society or exploit low-wage workers.
FAQs
Q: What is the main topic of the book "The Thinking Machine"?
A: The book is a biography of Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, and the company’s rise to dominance in the tech industry.
Q: What are some of the challenges of writing a book on the tech industry?
A: One of the main challenges is that the story will be slightly out of date in the few months between the final draft being turned in and the hardback hitting the shelves.
Q: What is Nvidia’s main product?
A: Nvidia makes microchips that power A.I. systems like ChatGPT.
Q: What is the future of A.I.?
A: The book leaves the reader unsure of what the future of A.I. holds, but it does suggest that Jensen Huang’s company, Nvidia, is well-positioned to continue leading the charge in the development of A.I. technology.
