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.
why aren't all 14 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Huang: AI innovation must be accelerated, not slowed, to improve safety
“There were even attitudes that, that we had to slow down AI innovation, which I believe is exactly the opposite. We had to speed up AI innovation because through innovation, we can make the technology safer, more secure.”
Huang would 'absolutely not' start NVIDIA again if he knew the pain
“The question is, suppose I knew everything then that I now know how hard it is, and all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks, and you compress all of that. And you just told that thirty-year-old kid, listen t…”
Huang: NVIDIA refuses to enter markets merely to take market share
“We don't want to dedicate our lives to go work on something that the worlds already have. I don't want our company working on things to capture share from somebody. They built a market. We want to take their share, and so let's go and fight to the bitter end, …”
Distributing CUDA for free on GPUs severely depressed NVIDIA's gross margins
“The answer was, let's use GeForce, which is the GPU that is now everywhere in the world used for playing video games. And let's have GeForce carry on its back CUDA to every single computer in the world. Now, of course, by doing so, our gross margins would go f…”
Customers returned all 250,000 units of NVIDIA's first chip, the NV1
“Yeah, we sold 250,000. I've now, you know, I believe we could sell 250,000 of almost anything. But the algorithm didn't really work, and so we received 250,000 back. I mean, it all came back.”
Huang: NVIDIA spent half its remaining cash on a surplus hardware emulator
“And I took half of our company's money, so we were already running on fumes, and so I cut that life short even further, took that money, bought this machine that nobody else wanted to buy, brought it to the company, I said, here we are.”
Huang: Sega converted remaining $5M contract into NVIDIA equity investment
“And they turn the rest of the five million dollars of investment or contract into our investment in our company.”
Huang: NVIDIA was the first company bringing 3D graphics to consumers
“We were the first three-D graphics company in the world that started with the idea that we bring three-D graphics to consumers.”
Jensen Huang describes himself as a 'battlefield CEO' energized by crisis
“The way I'm built is you put me in crisis. Alright, the perfect day is we are in trouble. And you just create the worst possible condition and Jensen, you need, we need you to come and help us think through this. That's my perfect. That's my vibe. Battlefield.…”
Huang: NVIDIA's initial graphics architecture was incompatible with Microsoft's DirectX API
“And Microsoft is about to announce Windows 95. And Windows 95 has a API called DirectX, and DirectX does it the right way, and we were incompatible with DirectX. And so anyways, we chose some approaches that were just fundamentally wrong.”
Huang: NVIDIA laid off two-thirds of its workforce after Sega pivot
“So anyways, I laid off two thirds of the company.”
Huang: Sega contracted NVIDIA for $12 million in 1994–1995
“And they contracted us for twelve million dollars in 1995, 1994.”