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rurp • yesterday at 5:49 PM • 4 replies • view on HN

Giving Jensen credit for creating literally all of the value from Nvidia seems really over the top. He happened to be running the biggest GPU company during the biggest GPU boom ever. Sure he had an impact on the numbers and the timing, but if Jensen had never been born someone else would be heading a giant chip company around this period of time that saw it's stock take off like a rocket ship. This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.


Replies

ozgung • yesterday at 11:50 PM

> Giving Jensen credit for creating literally all of the value from Nvidia seems really over the top.

He was the cofounder, president and CEO since 1993. Nvidia hired/created CUDA in 2004 and made it central to its strategy. That’s almost 20 years before the current AI boom.

GPUs, as you know, are just Graphics processors and there is no reason to use them for AI. The only reason for their popularity in AI is CUDA. Because in 2012 Alex Krizhevsky, along with Sutskever and Hinton trained AlexNet to win the ImageNet competition and started the current AI revolution. One of their secrets was using a graphics accelerator (GPU) as a supercomputer to train larger neural networks. This was only possible thanks to CUDA. After 14 years CUDA is still the industry standard for training neural networks.

That strategy converted the 90s 3D accelerator startup into the most valuable company of the world today. But after today, they’re just a standard chipmaker with no vision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA

dmonitor • yesterday at 6:20 PM

Isn't he the entire reason Nvidia invested so heavily in tensor cores before AI even became a massive market mover? He definitely deserves credit for setting Nvidia up with a massive lead in this emergent industry.

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Pavilion2095 • yesterday at 6:00 PM

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neya • yesterday at 6:16 PM

It's easy to dismiss someone's life's work when you aren't the one in their shoes.

> This would happen even if the counterfactual CEO was incompetent.

Tell that to Intel's ex-CEO.

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