The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Huang says he wouldn't have started NVIDIA if he knew the suffering
“The reason why I wouldn't do it, and it goes back to why it's so hard, is building a company and building a video turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, any of us expected it to be. And at that time, if we realized the pain an…”
Huang: Causality matters less than outcome prediction for many problems
“And so causality for a lot of problems in the world doesn't matter. We just want to emulate the system and predict the outcome.”
Huang says almost all software will be programmed via machine learning
“Almost every piece of software in the world would eventually be programmed this way.”
Huang: LLM reasoning and emergent capabilities stem naturally from reading text
“Within the world's languages and text, there's a fair amount of reasoning that's encoded in it, and we describe a lot of reasoning things, and so if you were To say that a few step reasoning is somehow learnable from just reading things. I wouldn't be surprise…”
Huang: Company org charts should mirror the architecture of their products
“Your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product. Right. That's what a company is.”
Huang says traditional managers rely on information asymmetry, unlike at NVIDIA
“In a command and control system, the person who you reports to has more power than you. And the reason why they have more power than you is because they're closer to the source of information than you are. In our company, the information is disseminated fairly…”
Huang: NVIDIA is only accelerator maker with universal architectural compatibility
“We are the only accelerator on the planet where every single accelerator is architecturally compatible with the others. None has ever existed.”
Huang: Founders can do everything right and fail, or make mistakes and succeed
“You could do all the right smart things and still fail. You could do a whole bunch of dumb things, and I did many of them, and still succeed.”
Huang: NVIDIA's RIVA 128 chip design methodology became the industry standard
“The number of smart decisions we made, which are smart to this day, how we design chips is exactly the same to this day. Because, gosh, you know, nobody's ever done it back then, and we pulled every trick in the book in a desperation because we had no other ch…”
Huang: Tech companies will become much larger as they manufacture intelligence
“Don't be surprised if technology companies become much larger in the future, because what you produce is something very different.”
Huang: I would start NVIDIA again knowing how it turned out
“Of course, I, it was taken out of context because I was asked about that several times after that, and of course I would start the company if I knew it would turn out this way.”
Huang: Nobody would start NVIDIA knowing 32 years of hardship beforehand
“The mountain of it in the course of 31 years, if I were to take all of that all the challenges and all the hardship and all the pain and suffering of the last 32 years, and I would have compressed it into the brain of a twenty-nine-year-old, there is no way th…”
Huang: An entrepreneur's superpower is ignorance of how hard startup life is
“And my point there is the super point of entrepreneurs, which is your superpowers are partly your ignorance, that you don't know how hard it is.”
Huang: Markets where technology is never good enough offer sustainable opportunity
“And for certain segments of the market where the technology is never good enough, like three D graphics, when we chose the right technology, three D graphics is never good enough. And we call it back then, three D gives us sustainable technology opportunity be…”
Huang: Betting the farm requires prefetching and simulating all future risk
“And so when you push your chips in, what you're really doing is you're, when you bet the farm, you're saying, I'm going to take everything in the future, all the risky things, and I'm going to pull it in advance. And that is probably the lesson. And to this da…”
Huang: Separating compute location from display explodes hardware market opportunity
“The disconnection between where NVIDIA's computing is done versus where it's enjoyed, If you can separate that, your market opportunity explodes.”
Huang: Distributed networking and infrastructure define data centers, not chips
“A data center is distinguished from a desktop computer versus a cell phone, not by the processor in it. A desktop computer in a data center uses the same CPUs, uses the same GPUs, apparently, right? Very close. And so it's not the chip, it's not the processing…”
Huang: AI computing is the inverse of traditional hyperscale cloud computing
“Observation that whereas cloud computing started in hyperscale, which is about taking commodity components, a lot of users, and virtualizing many users on top of one computer, AI is really about distributed computing where one job, one training job is orchestr…”
Huang: Enabling an ecosystem in an early market builds a network moat
“Oftentimes, if you created the market, you ended up having, you know, what people describe as moats. Because if you build your product right, and it's enabled an entire ecosystem around you, To help serve that end market, you've essentially created a platform.…”
Huang: Quake and Unreal were the first two killer consumer 3D apps
“If he hadn't decided to go to OpenGL and accelerate, accelerate for Quake frankly, you know, what would be the killer app that put us here? And so Carmack and Sweeney, both between Unreal and Quake, created the first two killer applications for consumer three …”
Huang says workers will lose jobs to AI users, not AI
“It's more likely that someone, ah, will lose a job to someone else Some other human that uses an AI, you know, and not, not likely to an AI, but to some other human that uses an AI.”
Huang: An entrepreneur's superpower is asking 'how hard can it be?'
“And I think that that's kind of the superpower of a entrepreneur. They don't know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves, how hard can it be? And to this day, I trick my brain into thinking, how hard can it be? Because you have to.”
Huang: NVIDIA was the only consumer 3D graphics company in 1993
“Now remember, at the time that we started the company in 1993,
We were the only consumer, three D graphics company ever created”
Huang: 1997 was probably NVIDIA's best moment despite near bankruptcy
“And that time, 1997, was probably NVIDIA's best moment, and the reason for that was our backs were up against the wall, we were running out of time, we were running out of money, and for a lot of employees, running out of hope.”
NVIDIA's programmable shaders were the first massively parallel processors
“And if you just looked at the pipeline of a programmable shader, it is a processor and is highly parallel, and it is massively threaded, and it is the only processor in the world that does that.”
Huang personally delivered the first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI
“DGX, the first version that we built was used internally, and I delivered the first one to OpenAI”
Huang: GeForce NOW was NVIDIA's first data center product, preceding CUDA supercomputing
“GeForce Now was NVIDIA's first data center product. And our second data center product was remote graphics, putting our GPUs in, in the world's enterprise data centers, which then led us to our third product, which combined CUDA plus our GPU, which became a su…”
Huang: CEOs must position companies near future opportunities before they appear
“You want to pave the way to future opportunities. You can't wait until the opportunity is sitting in front of you for you to reach out for it, and so you have to anticipate. You know, our job as CEO is to look around corners and anticipate where will opportuni…”
Huang: Someday every car will be software-defined
“And I said, I don't think anybody can tolerate that, but it doesn't change the fact that someday every car will be a software defined car.”
Huang: NVIDIA has 250M to 300M active compatible CUDA GPUs globally
“There are literally a couple of hundred million, right? 250,000,300 million installed base of active CUDA GPUs being used in the world today, and they're all architecturally compatible.”
Architectural compatibility is NVIDIA's only non-negotiable operating rule
“And so, that's the only unnegotiable rule in our company. Everything else is negotiable.”
Jensen Huang: There is plenty of time if you don't let Outlook control your schedule
“There's plenty of time. If you prioritize yourself properly and you make sure that you don't let Outlook be the controller of your time, there's plenty of time.”
Huang: Startup financial forecasts matter far less than core defensibility
“It turns out that making a financial forecast that nobody knows is going to be right or wrong turns out not to be that important. But the important things that a business plan probably could have teased out, I think that the art of writing a business plan ough…”
Huang: CUDA is used across almost all fields of scientific research
“CUDA is used for almost all fields of science. Everything from molecular dynamics to imaging, CT reconstruction to seismic processing to, you know, weather simulations, quantum chemistry, the list goes on, right?”
Huang: Leaders should take inspiration from business books without adopting them
“Enjoy it, be inspired by it, but not to adopt it. That's not the whole point of these books. The whole point of these books is to share their experiences, and you, you're supposed to ask, you know, what does it mean to me in my world, and what does it mean to …”
Huang spends significant time on Omniverse, a 'zero-billion-dollar' business
“And so we spent about a decade in zero billion dollar markets, and today I spent a lot of time on Omniverse, and Omniverse is a, you know, classic example of a zero billion dollar business.”
Huang: The primary benefit of building for developers is seeing external ideas
“As many good ideas as we have you don't have all the world's good ideas. And the benefit of having developers is you get to see a lot of good ideas.”