alt Hacker NewsHere's why Jensen is critical to Nvidia as well as the industry:
Without Jensen Huang's vision, Nvidia might have remained primarily a graphics chip maker, and the deep learning revolution would not have arrived when it did. Long before deep neural networks took off, Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA. In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom. Nvidia's investment in programmable GPUs helped make that breakthrough possible.
The critical vision was that GPUs could become a platform for computing beyond graphics—and that Nvidia should invest in making them programmable before a large market for that use existed.
The board should punish Huang without punishing the industry and the nation. For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
Replies
His behavior demonstrates poor judgement. Demonstrating poor judgement is the best reason to fire an executive. More companies should do it.
That doesn't explain why Jensen is critical to NVDA. It explain why he WAS.
You are definitely overselling him. If you are a hardware maker, you naturally want to sell to as many markets as possible. It doesn’t take a huge leap of faith.
This reads as inauthentic astroturfing. The man was compromised by intelligence.
He was sleeping with staff and a suspected Chinese spy. No one of character can respect or trust him anymore.
> In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom.
NVIDIA went nowhere for much of its history. Just look at its stock chart for most of its history.
They got a major upside due to two things that happened outside of NVIDIA: Crypto currency and AI, both of this found GPUs to be the best available technology to retrofit. Most of the initial work in retrofitting GPUs to these workloads happened outside of NVIDIA.
So, it's not Jensen but the Crypto and AI that propelled NVIDIA.
I feel like you're overstating NVidia's influence. OpenCL with AMD GPUs was also just fine around that time, we were all figuring out how much you could port and get a crazy speed up for not much effort. NVidia's ecosystem was particularly annoying to deal with on Linux. Maybe we'd have gotten AlexNet a year later without Cuda.
Visionaries you can get a dime a dozen. Worshipping individuals like this is not healthy.
Back in 2002-2003 there were folks attempting to get GPUs to do non graphics tasks because of the amount of potential compute available. I recall running a sorting algorithm on a Radeon at the time. It wasn't quick but it worked.
The idea was out there and Nvidia leaned into it first. GPU compute was going to happen regardless, but credit to Nvidia they actively developed it seeing its future uses.
> Huang backed the use of Nvidia GPUs for scientific and general-purpose computing, including the development of CUDA
Very well, but backing CUDA is an old decision that has paid off and will continue to pay off because Nvidia has operationalized it. It can and will continue to run without Jensen Huang.
> The board should punish Huang without punishing the industry and the nation. For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
What sort of punishment is this to somebody who is already worth hundreds of billions of dollars?
the only things the "AI industry" has done is price normal people out of computing, give justification for companies to lay people off, fill the internet with slop, contribute to centralizing capital, and add a transaction cost to everything people do with their computers. i couldn't care less about the "industry" that focuses on profits or the "nation" that is more committed to overseas wars than providing basic infrastructure.
I think we are yet to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.
> For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
That wouldn't really punish him. It makes no difference if you have 10 billion dollars or 90 billion dollars, your life is the same.
You describe why Jensen WAS critical for Nvidia and the industry.
Nope. These are inexplicable things that point to Jensen allegedly collaborating with a foreign actor and nation. The board should punish Huang and save our industry and the nation. Plain and simple.
> by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years
That's less than a slap on the wrist.
Sure, and Jobs was a visionary for launching the iPhone, yet Apple has still done incredibly well under Cook
He had a nice jacket but I think it was Ian Buck that was actually useful?
They should also give him a slap on the wrist while they're at it
He's an extremely skilled shovel seller, but let's not pretend he foresaw the reason for every hole being dug. Most universities taught CUDA classes way back. Did they also see deep learning and cryptocurrencies coming? Supercomputers did exist and where all about FLOPS and that was a legit market. Intel released their Xeon Phi cards around the same time. Ironically, while deep learning started with consumer graphics cards, it could have started on super computers and right now it's back to super computers anyway.
Thank you for the insight, Claude.
The man cannot even keep his pants secure - how can he secure GPUs from being smuggled?
Sleep with a subordinate. Sleep with Chinese spy. Sell export restricted chips to Chinese shell company (likely knowingly). Lobby on behalf of China.
No one is irreplaceable
This is some AI-generated slop.
>Here's why
stopped reading
Nobody is irreplaceable. And this includes Jensen Huang.
You can say (rightly) that he has vastly contributed to NVidia's success. Well, he's been well compensated for that to the tune of almost $200 billion. Will the company fall apart without him now? No. No, it won't.
Also, if they fire him today, nothing will really change for a few years anyway. The short-to-medium plans are already locked in.
[dead]
> For example by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years.
Oh no he will no longer be able to afford anything and everything he wants and only be able to afford anything and everything he wants.
Great punishment. /s
[dead]
Here’s why Jensen needs to go:
I’m a gamer and I want my fucking GPUs back.
Viewing people like this is unhealthy. Nvidia could have failed instead of 3dfx, and that it didn't involved some luck, not just the magical clairvoyance of one individual.
And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.