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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.

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No chance of that - it wasn't luck. I was there. Nvidia was simply a lot better and Huang must get a lot of credit but he hired good people.

This well researched video I endorse. Sure Nvidia was touch and go a the very start but beyond that, they were just locked in.

How Nvidia Won Graphics Cards - Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRZqE6H-dww

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There's a nearly 20 year lead up to the current CUDA dominance including working with developers, but on the gaming side there's also a parallel with the dominance of nvidia's gaming tech versus how much ATi/AMD were able to get their tech to stick. Nv invested not just in capable hardware then throw it over the fence to leave developers to figure out, but software solutions easily integrated by others and engineer support to show off their hardware in the best light.

More directly on topic, I can't help thinking this is also a question of "what have you done for me lately" versus "what are you going to do for me tomorrow". It's hard to doubt he and the company as a whole have executed a vision and reaped the rewards, but have they been planning and doing the groundwork for another act.

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> planning and doing the groundwork for another act.

A nontrivial part of which is pumping up an infrastructure bubble with NVIDIA money. It wouldn't shock me if that very aggressive and increasingly questioned strategy plays a role in whatever happens to Jensen.

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Cuda was first but there was also openCL shortly thereafter. The idea was bound to hatch.
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> whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.

Why? There were the reason why NVIDIA GPUs became so successful at the first place.

Who knows whether Jensen's current leadership isn't generating today's CUDA for NVIDIA?

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The design of cuda is basically just brookGPU from stanford (supported by IBM, Sony, ATI, NVIDIA and DARPA), CUDA isn't so important beyond the fact that a hardware company can use it as a moat if they want to be anti-competitive. Google bought PeakStream, intel bought RapidMind.

The situation only exists because regulators in the 80s-20s believe that hardware should be a sanctioned monopoly. Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, and Microsoft were all involved. If it's not Jensen it'd be someone else, there is a good reason NVIDIA is called NVIDIA and not JENSEN. Jensen's leadership is as much resonsible for CUDA as G. W. Bush's.

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His behavior demonstrates poor judgement. Demonstrating poor judgement is the best reason to fire an executive. More companies should do it.
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A personal failing not a poor business judgement. Unless it can be shown that the company could have sold more GPUs if he had exercised better judgement.
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The timeline of the Chinese spy stuff raises serious concerns - the Chinese company created the shell company and days later inked a massive deal with NVIDIA. There are federal sanctions against this... that's not a poor business judgement?

> For Ms. Huang, there was reason to celebrate. Backed by wealthy investors in Shanghai, she had just restructured a company that would soon buy billions of dollars in Nvidia artificial intelligence chips. The U.S. government had barred Chinese companies from buying the advanced chips, but Ms. Huang had sidestepped this prohibition by creating a firm, Megaspeed, through a Singaporean shell company.

> Her close relationship with Nvidia’s leader also appeared to smooth the way. Four days after the ownership change Megaspeed was named a Nvidia cloud partner, giving it access to the coveted components.

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It’s not just a personal failing. He was being used to bypass restrictions against an adversarial government. Why are people acting like he’s in trouble because he violated the boy scouts code of conduct? The restrictions on China have a national security angle to them.
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Export restrictions to China have nothing to do with national security and everything to do with political capital. OpenSSL is a restricted export as a hold over from WW2 era of political theater for shit sake.

If China was a national security threat, you’d think at least TEMU would be banned in the US. Instead most things in any store in the US are made in China. The restrictions are entirely political theater to score cheap political points as long as it has no impact on the day to day lives of people. Actually impose sanctions or tariffs or ban trade with China, and you’ll see how the “national security threat” angle immediately changes.

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Sure, they have nothing to do with NatSec if you think AI progress will plateau here.
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This "China is an enemy state" story is a stale joke.

If China is the enemy then why do we have entire stores selling nothing but Chinese made goods in the US? Why is everyone running to China to manufacture anything? If China is the enemy the whole world is in bed with them.

All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.

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China can be a trading partner while also being a geopolitical rival, no?
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Imagine if every high street in America had three stores selling Hamas-styled garden gnomes with "death to America :)" written on them. Obviously that does not happen, right? Because Hamas is actually an enemy of America. Since this does happen with China we can conclude China is not an enemy.
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It must be wonderful to go through life with such a simple-minded view of the world.
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It’s difficult to talk about this stuff when starting from 0, but I’ll try to kick it off and leave it for someone else to wrap up.

China adopted an intentional strategy where western companies for benign reasons of profit leveraged China’s immense human capital to produce products and lower costs for everyone across the planet. This was a win for many. China got to industrialize and lift citizens out of poverty, and companies across the world were able to deliver mass produced good (eventually high quality) for cheap. The United States for example was the champion of China joining the WTO.

But China because it’s a communist dictatorship restricted its market and began doing things that were long-term oriented toward depriving others of power and manufacturing capability for their regime’s private gain. For example today we see that China has over-built its manufacturing capacity (like it did with housing) and has used artificially cheap labor, unjust laws, and currency manipulation (among many other things) to prevent entry into their market while running companies from other countries out of business leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Prominently you can look at Germany today where sales in China have collapsed, and at home their vaunted manufacturing industry is going through what happened in the US in the so-called “rust belt”. The US has smartly enacted tariffs and other measures to protect its market to some extent from China’s strategy here.

So when someone says something like “all this talk goes out the window about competition when it comes to China” you’ve got to understand a bit more about how China has behaved toward other nations and the egregiously unfair trade practices it has enacted to understand why many countries ranging from the US, to Mexico, to Australia and of course the EU have enacted various restrictions and industrial policy to combat China’s embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade.

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> China’s embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade.

That is equivalent to saying that the Chinese have been as good businessmen as the Americans.

"Embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade" is a phrase that is equally applicable to USA.

For decades USA had succeeded by various means of bribing and blackmailing to destroy the local industries in many countries, based on the propaganda about a free global trade, forcing those countries to not protect in any way their industries that competed with US companies, because supposedly if they bought instead cheaper and better US products that will be a win-win situation, even if they become dependent on USA, but they should not worry because USA can be trusted as a commercial partner and will always provide those products in advantageous terms.

But in the recent years, USA has made a U-turn, and now it makes desperate attempts to protect its own industries in the same way that it had forbidden other countries to do and moreover USA has invented bogus legal theories that when any products that contain even a few percent of parts with a US origin are sold to someone, the buyers do not own what they have bought, but USA has the right to dictate to them what to do with those products, so that now everybody knows that USA cannot be trusted as a commercial partner and buying anything from it must be avoided.

The Chinese may have used many unfair commercial tactics, but this is really not something that Americans may criticize, because since WWII USA has been a champion of unfair commercial tactics, of which most Americans do not appear to be aware.

As an example, I have seen in USA comments that when NATO has expanded by incorporating many Eastern European countries, that was a favor made to those. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Those countries were forced to buy their memberships with many billions of $. They were blackmailed to accept in exchange for their membership to make contracts worth of many billions for buying products or services from certain US companies at greatly inflated prices, so certain well-connected US shareholders must have gained a lot of money from the NATO expansion.

This was a single example, but it was just typical for how USA has always acted in the global trade since WWII, by using any means possible to gain commercial advantages for its major companies.

If one subscribes to the theory that the only mission of any company is to make as much money for its shareholders as possible, and that the state should assist in this objective, one can see the behavior of USA as legitimate, but then the fact that China was clever enough to also ensure as much profit for its industries as possible is equally legitimate.

As non-American and non-Chinese, I dislike equally their dominance in the global trade. In my opinion, the only way that would benefit to the entire mankind is to not have the production of anything concentrated in a single country or in a couple of countries, but it should be possible to produce locally everywhere any of the products that a human needs, from food and clothes to electronic components. The advantages in avoiding excessive dependencies from others far outweigh any economies of scale of mass production.

A half of century ago, this was not an unusual economic model, e.g. many US companies were licensing their IP to local producers in various countries, so they could produce there things that had been designed in USA, instead of importing finished products and becoming dependent. Nowadays companies are much greedier, so they are no longer content with a modest revenue from licensing, but they want to milk all the profit that can be obtained by being the only source for the end product, without alternatives, so patents and the like are used only for preserving a quasi-monopoly position, by preventing competition.

USA and China are free to act in their own best interests, but other countries should make much more serious efforts to reduce their external dependencies.

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> to understand why many countries ranging from the US, to Mexico, to Australia and of course the EU have enacted various restrictions and industrial policy to combat China

Anything but actually stop having a complete dependency on China for their entire way of life of course because that would be too hard. So just do vague gestures to collect votes and move on.

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They are decoupling but its a slow process
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> But China because it’s a communist dictatorship restricted its market and began doing things that were long-term oriented toward depriving others of power and manufacturing capability for their regime’s private gain.

As other states famously don't do things for their regime's private gain? (Even calling it "private gain" is arguably stretching it in the case of China, the other superpowers USA and Russia are certainly much better at the private gain part)

"Depriving others of power" other states definitively do whenever they can, and they're often better at it. Depriving others of manufacturing wasn't so much China did, as something it said "yes please" to and played along with. Manufacturing was offshored to a lot of other countries than China, this was something western leadership, for whatever reason, deeply wanted.

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so many sterotypos in a row. no wonder you people never learn and will fail before you even know. The freedom of press really create a generation of brainwashed people in the 'free world'
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If the Chinese government is such a friend why are they employing spies to work around trade restrictions?
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Chinese policy is actually to ban import of NVIDIA cards. It's partly a "you can't fire me, I quit" thing and partly a "burn the boats on the beach" thing to fully commit to developing rivals domestically.

Obviously many businesses are working around this, but it raises questions about whether Alice Huang was actually a government spy vs someone doing shady import business. Why was her day job circumventing a government policy if she's a government spy?

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It's interesting because they like apparently missed the part where in literal wars companies (ex. Ford, Alcoa) literally supply both sides and nobody broke those companies up.
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> If China is the enemy then why do we have entire stores selling nothing but Chinese made goods in the US? Why is everyone running to China to manufacture anything?

Because geopolitics is a lot more complicated than leaving a group chat? This is like the inverse fallacy of Trump's take on trade deficits. Trade volume isn't the sum total of foreign policy.

> All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.

I'm no fan of the "but muh free market" arguments, but generally competition is seen as good for the market only when it's "fair"...

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He actually sold more GPUs, just not where the US government wanted them to go.

Violation sanctions, and likely knowingly, is not good for Nvidia.

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If MegaSpeed (or any quantity buyer of GPUs in Asia) held all required licenses and met all U.S. export and KYC regulations, selling product to them was legal.

If a legally authorized customer later breaks the law, that doesn't make the supplier guilty of something they didn't do. It means the regulations and enforcement are ineffective. MegaSpeed has apparently been extensively investigated by both the Commerce and Justice Depts for some time and no charges have been filed so far. If the US Govt suspects MegaSpeed is a problem, they can add them to the blocked entity list at any time with no evidence or justification.

Frankly, I agree that someone in Asia has been diverting GPUs. But the US Govt has all the power here and can block anyone they want. If NVidia was knowingly violating export controls by back-channeling GPUs, that's serious jail time and personal fines up to $1M per card. These things have the same penalties for export violations as cruise missiles - and the same national security investigative powers. If NVidia was under suspicion, spooks have been reading all NVidia's company and personal emails and texts, tapping phones, bugging conference rooms, etc. If NVidia was knowingly subverting U.S. export controls, we'd be seeing arrests and perp walks not anonymous leaks about who Jensen's banging.

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>If NVidia was knowingly subverting U.S. export controls, we'd be seeing arrests and perp walks not anonymous leaks about who Jensen's banging.

The public evidence around Megaspeed points to NVidia knowing and the government knowing that NVidia was doing it.

Whether the federal government chooses to arrest/prosecute the CEO of the world’s second-largest company is a different decision which is made at the level of the president. Trump did an interview last week where he said that he threatened an AI CEO with jail time:

"We said, 'Go home right now. See your wife and children. Give them a kiss good night,'" Trump added. "Because tomorrow morning, you're going to jail."

After saying the unnamed executive had "totally changed everything" after the alleged warning

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-administration-jail-le...

If you know the AI CEOs, Amodei is unmarried and Altman is gay.

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This whole China ban is meaningless in my opinion because the ban is only on exporting physical GPUs to China. The US is OK with Chinese logging in to machines that are physically located in Singapore. Is there any advantage in sitting close to the GPUs, if not what is the point of this ban?
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> The US is OK with Chinese logging in to machines that are physically located in Singapore

They're not OK with it, they're about to pressure Singapore, Malaysia and others to ban this too. Why? Because they're a bunch of losers petrified of open competition.

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China can generate an enormous amount of electricity so a GPU is worth more to them on home soil.
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Maybe.

But if what they discovered wasn’t usable in a prosecution, pressuring the board with his affairs isn’t unthinkable.

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At the highest levels and in the times of most stress, can you have one without the other?
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At this level, as he should know with the amount of scrutiny on public figures and hoe that they say and do can affect share price - ones personal actions can be business decisions.

And this is an obvious example.

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Having alleged sexual intercourse with a direct report certainly arises to poor business judgment.
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I think he can be disciplined without the company sawing off the branch it is sitting on. If Huang had been sued for sexual harassment then the bar would be higher.
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Agrees. The company actually sold more GPUs. Not fewer!
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A personal failing involving treachery made public lowers trust towards him, even in business situations. Should have been more upright or more discrete.
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The two are not unrelated. Judgement is judgement, and a person who shows poor judgement outside of business is at risk of showing poor judgement in business as well. As indeed he did: the dude was banging one of his subordinates, something he would've known full well is completely unacceptable in American business culture.
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>> completely unacceptable

Except, it happens frequently and most of the time people ignore it. In practice, it is accepted most of the time.

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Are you serious? Sleeping with a subordinate gets people fired all the time. It is absolutely not ignored.
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+1. I know a couple who was working in a multi national. She was reporting to him. When they started dating she moved to a different department. Eventually they married, she left the multi national altogether and became a stay at home mom.

I know another case when a lady working in a multi national cheated on her husband with her boss. Soon enough her boss had to “tackle a few challenges “ … in a different country LOL. The bosscame back to the Borg a few years later.

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They didn’t say every time, they said all the time - which is true. But as you said, it can work out if it’s disclosed and a person can move outside of the org chart of the other.
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I'm American. I don't agree with you. Don't speak for me
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Good for you. You don't define the workplace culture we operate in. Any employer out there would fire you in a heartbeat for sleeping with a subordinate.
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Warren Buffet has a non-puritanical relationship structure.

Who cares?

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NVIDIA is one of the most successful companies in the world in large part because of Jensen.

You cannot reduce a person to 'good judgement' or 'bad judgement'. It's a mix. And in this case it seems like the good outweighs the bad for both the company and its shareholders.

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Poor morals isn't the same as poor judgement. Clearly he has had very very good business and technical judgement over the years.
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Are you implying that if you have good judgement a few times, you can't have any bad judgement ever?
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Dating a spy is not poor judgment? And sorry, if you're running of the world's most valuable and strategically important companies, and if an attractive woman with hazy business connections appears out of the blue in your orbit, you really ought to entertain the possibility.

Wasn't it Anthropic or OpenAI that sent a warning about this exact possibility to regular employees?

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Exactly! I said this elsewhere in this thread but why are we so willing to reward these executives with insane wealth and influence but they can’t be held to the same level of standards they expect from their own employees?
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It is the same standard though.

Why do you think we always have to do those trainings every year about not taking supplier to strip clubs?

If you break the rules but bring in business you get to stick around. That's the actual rule.

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I mean, even before you get into her being a spy, giving company secrets to an affair partner generally isn't very good business judgment either.

Whether you think that outweighs everything else is a distinct argument, but the two things aren't mutually exclusive.

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> Clearly he has had very very good business and technical judgement over the years.

How can you tell? Sitting on the top of a huge self inflating baloon that goes up doesn't mean you are an excellent pilot.

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Treating AMD/Intel as a control group, Nvidia has done quite well.
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By this measure, Sergei Brin and Eric Schmidt and Musk and many more would be retired somewhere quietly.
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They slept with foreign spies and helped them evade export controls?
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Does poor judgement in personal matters translate into poor judgement in running a company? Especially with this track record?

If that was the case, IMO he wouldn't have come this far.

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We have seen CEOs stick around for far more, let alone a CEO who has been there from the start.

Was anything confidential leaked?

I'm not sure why Jensen is getting this kind of treatment.. did he treat people worse than Steve Jobs?

Would there be others who might benefit from Jensen not being at Nvidia?

But a Steve Jobs

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> Was anything confidential leaked?

Given what her job was, it’s hard to think that conversations were not technical in nature. Every action JH made toward China will now be examined, and he’s lost all credibility going forward. There really is no path to keep him.

The other thing this highlighted was the complete lack of governance which is the board’s job. So right after they fire JH, they need to replace most of the board with people who can handle the governance of a company of this scope.

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It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.

Poor judgement is the kind of shit Zuckerberg or Musk do, and their poor judgement actually impacts the whole world in big ways, but they can't be fired because they don't give their board any control.

Jensen's management of NVIDIA has been good, and NVIDIA has generally been a great force for real innovation without much rent-seeking or corruption like the others. They haven't started messing with politics or trying to buy elections. It's kind of sad to see Jensen be the one we topple at a time of rage against corporate power when he's probably one of the better stewards.

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> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

In fact sleeping with a subordinate (look up Kimberly Powell) creates substantial legal risk for the company on its own, even without all the other stuff.

> We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have.

He apologized to his wife and said that his actions hurt her and that there was no excuse for what he did, soooooo, yeah we kinda do.

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Re: his wife, there is absolutely no way he would admit to some kind of open relationship thing in public, that would be even worse PR. Sleeping with an exec.. personally I don't care, this is incredibly common and there is no actual legal problem if there wasn't favoritism.
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> there is absolutely no way he would admit to some kind of open relationship thing in public, that would be even worse PR.

That argument doesn't hold water given everything Elon has done.

Heck Elon also slept with an exec. No one cared.

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Why are you going so far out of your way to invent reasons why he secretly didn't actually cheat on his wife and to ignore the corporate legal risk of non-disclosed relationships that create conflicts of interest?
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I just feel that personal misdeeds should stay in that realm, and also a ban on relationships in the workplace like we effectively have now has kind of been bad for our culture broadly... you can call it a "legal risk" but at the end of the day, if there was no favouritism then nothing wrong happened besides some form to HR not being filled out.

Separately, when I look around at all the billionaires and CEO's causing immense harm to the world, Jensen is near the bottom of that list.. Musk's tantrums have global geopolitical implications including wide cultural shifts, elections and deaths. An actual convicted rapist is president of the country. Many, many leaders cheering on death, division, racism, white supremacy, anti-vaxxing, it just goes on.

But we're all supposed to be salivating over firing this guy who has by most accounts been an incredible founder and leader over cheating or selling a couple of GPUs to China? I think it's just sad seeing this guy get punished given the amount of moral corruption amongst our leaders. I don't think this is a coincidence, the worst people are usually better at evading consequences.

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Jensen's behavior is also very consequential...
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Are you his PR agent? Is your argument seriously he had open relationship with his ~70 year old wife?
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Lots of people meet in the workplace, it seems a really US thing to be so hung up on it.
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It’s more of a recent thing in the US too[1]. It started aggressively declining in the early 2000s (along with almost every other way except for online and bars). Though I think there is a general stigma in the US these days for “meeting at work” unless under certain circumstances, like 2 new hires hooking up, or 2 people at the same company but they don’t work together. Anything else and people are gonna start questioning the power dynamics and a bunch of things that make it not worth the hassle. Maybe it was the Lewinsky case, maybe it was the popularization of workplace abuse, maybe it is the bipartisan increase in judgement casting and virtue signaling.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho...

[2] https://data.stanford.edu/hcmst

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Meeting in the workplace is not the issue, the superior/subordinate relationship is. The power imbalance creates liability.
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Ok. And?
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And? I guess there's a few people on HN that are sleeping with their co-workers and their wives don't know about it and they're feeling a little guilty.
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There is always an awful lot of defense and downplaying of infidelity on hn. It is common but less common then the number that dont.
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He didn't sleep with a subordinate - Alice Huang was an Nvidia client, not an employee.
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I'm talking about his other affair, with Kimberly Powell. I've amended the previous comment to say so because I guess people don't know he's had more than one.
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You've exceeded its history cutoff
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Apologies, I was unaware of Jensen's embarrassing parallelism when I wrote my comment!
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It's just 2 being public. When you see 2 ants in your house, its never just 2 ants.
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the other dalliance
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Musk slept and has a child with Shivon Zilis who was his subordinate at the time, didn't seem to matter that much
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Just to clarify their child was via IVF. Which seems to be a common thing with Musk.
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> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company

If you don't see how secret affairs with spies and employees impacts the company then you're being willfully ignorant.

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> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

It evidently does. You may think it shouldn't, that marital fidelity has no bearing on ability to execute as CEO, and you may even be right. But it's clear that most people disagree.

That is not a surprise. It's a known fact that these kinds of things become scandals that can hurt their careers and companies. That they nevertheless still decided to do it, is therefore a professional failure.

It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy in that way. People think it matters, therefore it does. Again, you might believe that it doesn't have a direct impact, and so people shouldn't think it matters, but still they do, and you have to act in the world as it is, not as you wish it was. Simple as that.

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> But it's clear that most people disagree.

Wild take. To me, that isn't clear at all. Most people - including me - who simply don't really care aren't loud about it online.

It's like saying that obviously, everyone agrees that JK Rowling is a bad person that shouldn't be supported and needs to be boycotted. If your world view is made up of online forums that might very well seem to be the case, but in reality, the absolute vast majority of people couldn't care less about JK Rowling's political opinions, which is quite evident given the insane sales the Harry Potter franchise keeps pulling in.

The most likely scenario is that the vast majority couldn't care less about the Jensen Huang situation, and even if they did, they certainly wouldn't care enough to demand he resign or be booted.

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The evidence for most people caring about this issue isn't the online discourse about it.

The evidence is their stock being down 8% since the news came out.

How else would you explain that drop?

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And yet the stock drops 8.5 percent when the news comes out, it appears people do care huh?
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> I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company. We don't even know what arrangements him and his wife may have. But in the worst case, it's immoral and wrong but a personal issue for him and his family.

Yeah, if it's just some rando at a bar, then yeah it's primarily an issue for the family. (besides the fact that it indicates honesty issues)

Sleeping with a spy is a direct threat to the company. The spy isn't sleeping with him because she likes him. She is literally doing her job, which is to compromise the company. The issue is not the sleeping around part. The issue is the spy being brought into the company part.

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If he was banging the maid, then that is between him and his wife.

That was not the case here.

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The point is he didn't behave rationally on one big really important point from a shareholder value standpoint. He didn't just sleep with someone and his arrangements in this regard are irrelevant
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He was duped into smuggling GPUs, violating sanctions, and risking US national security, which endangers the company. Ain’t just that he banged someone.

If NVIDIA doesn’t fire him, I have a feeling a lot more women from a lot of other companies may be showing up with various proposals.

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Yep. His affairs cast a long shadow over his push for "restricting AI accelerators is bad, we should just sell all the GPUs we want to China".

Was it driven by this, as opposed to what everyone thought at the time: pure shortsighted profit-seeking? We don't know. But no one likes that it's even a thing to be concerned about.

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What's the argument that he was duped into doing it? He has plenty of incentive to want to sell more GPUs and broaden his customer base as much as possible, there's no evidence that sleeping with some Chinese lady that may or may not be a spy has anything to do with it.
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I bet many other CEOs do similar kinds of stuff, but for some reason this guy got singled out. The hungry hungry hippos probably did it because they could seeing as he doesn't control the board like MZ.
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You don't think selling $7.5B of export controlled technology to an unvetted and unknown company, led by a woman who's former gig was TV news host, and who you also happen to be sleeping with, was poor judgement?
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Its a good decision if there are no proven legal issues to selling to that company. It made more sales.
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> It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

If somebody you have any dealings with does something equally stupid, no matter the context, run. It doesn't matter how much you benefited from the cooperation, when somebody reveals themselves to have such poor judgement of anything, you must be aware that it's only a matter of time before he does somethig even dubmer which will cost you everything you gained so far and more.

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He should have divorced first, as expensive as it would have been. Being a single/divorced billionaire playboy is understandable, being a married billionaire playboy is going to be messy.
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US people are in another level or idiotic puritanism and hypocrisy.
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Wow, how can you respond to the parent in this way? Are you a psychopath? Also where is the hypocrisy? You accuse without any support.
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They actually are. People cry "psychopath" without reading the definition of the word.
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>It really doesn't. I don't see how sleeping with someone has any impact on the company.

jfc she was a spy and the new administration is going to smash nvidia for this

There are solid arguments for treason here... "doesn't affect the company", how blind are you?

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So far I haven't seen a shred of evidence pointing to Alice Huang being a spy besides just her being a Chinese citizen.. and China has been explicit in instructing its industries to NOT rely on NVIDIA cards as much as possible and build their own.
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Yes, China has been pushing their tech companies to use Chinese GPUs.. which they've gotten push back from their ai companies, saying they're not competitive yet (which is true). And one of those AI companies -- Alibaba -- was the investor in Megaspeed.. which is where Jensen met Alison.
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Ok, but the people who have the information to determine these things aren't in the habit of distributing detailed evidence to news organizations.
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The same people making the claim also regularly lie, or make ultimately false claims if you want to be more charitable.
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This isn’t McCarthy waving a his latest batch of names in front of the camera. Journalists started sniffing around Megaspeed a year ago, noticing its business presence and purchase volume didn’t add up.
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Megaspeed circumventing Chinese law banning imports of Nvidia cards is evidence against her being a spy rather than for. Why would a spy be working directly against official policy?

There's more than one kind of shady person.

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Honestly given the amount of hysteria, disinformation and propaganda I've seen about China since they've become a credible rival to the US, I'm not inclined to believe this stuff without serious evidence.
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> There are solid arguments for treason here

Yeah no. This doesn't even come close to treason. Treason in the US is incredibly difficult to prove, which is intentional.

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Should boards fire overweight CEOs? Poor judgment eating and drinking surely translates to how they manage a company
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Performative denseness is unattractive.
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So is being fat
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Pot meet kettle
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That doesn't explain why Jensen is critical to NVDA. It explain why he WAS.
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Pretty sure his criticality to NVDA is the fact that he founded it and has been its CEO for all of its existence. GPGPUs were entirely his vision. Back in 2008 when no one gave a shit about CUDA or GPGPUs he was the only one insisting that massive data processing on GPUs was going to be important for data centers. He kept funding that for another 15 years despite the target audience being niche scientific computing and the market not rewarding him for that. NVDA without him is going to be a different company. That’s obviously bound to happen sooner or later, but Apple without Steve is a different company than Apple with Steve. Could be better, could be worse, but it’ll surly be different.
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It is hard to imagine NVIDIA becoming better without him
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The conspiracy theorist in me thinks this was a ploy to buy the Chinese more time. They are coming for the GPGPU game with early entrants like Lisuan Tech LX 7G100. They are still a few years behind but you know their tenacity and commitment to getting it done by hook or by crook. A few years of Nvidia stumbling in the woods is all thats standing in the way of China catching up and taking yet another industry away from the west (as if Nuclear, Batteries, Cars, drones weren't enough). The Dems will have an ax to grind and I guess unlucky Jensen is the first victim. If they kill this golden goose man oh man the history books are going to be brutal.
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> The Dems will have an ax to grind and I guess unlucky Jensen is the first victim

Ahh, looks like the midterm results are still smarting!

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That's like saying it is OK that Steve Jobs died when he did because the iPhone was already in production by that time.
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And clearly it was ok from a business PoV?
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So you think Jobs had reached the end of his inventive streak?
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You think Jobs invented the products he was selling? He was a salesman, not an engineer.
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Jobs was a product visionary. He wasn’t an engineer, and wasn’t just a salesman.
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> Jobs was a product visionary.

I'd like some of what you're smoking. At best I could call him an artist, in the sense that "good artists copy, great artists steal".

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You reckon Apple board shouldn't have voted for his death?
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Jensen said we have AGI. Can't AGI do his job?

https://www.reddit.com/r/agi/comments/1s7sgg0/nvidias_jensen...

   In this case, Fridman had offered Huang a very unusual metric for AGI: Could AI start and grow a technology business to the point where it was worth $1 billion? Fridman asked if Huang thought AGI by this definition could be achieved within the next five to 20 years.

   Huang said he didn’t think that amount of time was necessary. “I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI,” he said. He then hedged, noting the company didn’t necessarily have to remain that valuable. “You said a billion,” Huang told Fridman, “and you didn’t say forever.”
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have you looked at Apple's stock price and product portfolio since 2011?
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You don't think Apple would be worth much more if Jobs was still CEO?
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They seem to be doing fine without him
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Yes, but they would do even more fine with him. Since Jobs' passing Apple has released only one successful product category: Watch.
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AirPods bring in around $18-22 billion annually
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RIP but yeah he was a bit rapey and didn't really add anything
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The Moor has done his work, the Moor may go.
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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.
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Why didn't other HW mfgs predict market swings as well as he did?

Why did NVDA fare differently than AMD or Intel?

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Agree. I'm thinking any decent CEO will gladly lean into new markets that want to use your products in ways you did not anticipate.
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This reads as inauthentic astroturfing. The man was compromised by intelligence.
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He was sleeping with staff and a suspected Chinese spy. No one of character can respect or trust him anymore.
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People care for financial results (the recent 4% stock dip after the scandal means nothing, Nvidia does dips like that 10-15 times every year based on various news).

And almost all of big CEOs sleep with stuff or not-their-wives. Many do worse, think certain private islands...

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Let's start holding all of them accountable. Then it'll be fair.
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Accountable for what? Cheating? It’s not illegal and hence none of your business.
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Evading sanctions.
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If maybe Jensen set foot in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or another ME country they could stone him for adultery. Thank god we don't have these religious laws in the US -- well I hope we don't..
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> No one of character can respect or trust him anymore.

Are there a lot of these types of people at the top?

Shit, can we even claim people gambling on stocks are "of character"?

There's a lot of gray here. I don't care that he chose to probably capitulate his marriage, but it does matter that he is somewhere between a honeypot buffoon or commiting light treason.

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There’s no way at least 50% of SP500 CEO’s never had an affair haha
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I, a shareholder who the board is supposed to represent, respect and trust him as a business person. I don't care for his private choices, but quite frankly I really don't care either. I'm not his wife. And I don't think any spy convinced him to sell more chips he is chips maxxing to the extreme all by himself.
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So when 98th woman births Elon’s 69th child we’ll draw the line and get him out as CEO? Or elect a Commander-in-Chief (twice) who F’ed porn stars while his wife was pregnant?
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Totally fine to want those people away from positions of responsibility too — I certainly do. Why assume people are arguing for an exceptionally harsh treatment here? (Even though, as the CEO of a public company whose influence on the future arguably outweighs both Musk and Trump, it would be merited)
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Just because he isn't as bad as Elon Musk doesn't mean he's okay
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Isn't this a strawman? Plenty of people want Trump out, but impeachment works differently
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do they want Trump out because of his infidelities or for other reasons? even Evangelicals voted for him (twice) so I don’t think it is him F’ing everything that moves
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I mean I want trump out for his infidelities as well as allegations of sexual assaults even on minors. I want him out for these reasons and more. I believe also lost the majority vote both times. The US elections being a convoluted mess with tons of corruption and Israeli influence is hardly a reason for why Jensen Huang shouldn’t suffer the consequence for his actions. I say fire him.
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he definitely did not lose popular vote in 2024 though… I don’t have a problem if he is fired but questioning why same standard isn’t applied generally? if he is fired, do we start a country-wide crusade to oust every horny CEO?
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I said majority vote not popular vote. I don’t blame you for being confused. If Jensen gets fired it won’t be merely due to his unfaithfulness. He put the company at risk by literally screwing a spy and allowing china to bypass export controls.
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What do you mean "lost the majority vote"? More people voted for him than anyone else, and he got a majority of the electoral college.
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Look up plurality vs majority.
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In American English "majority" can mean "plurality", it's a bit weird! [1] Saying "lost the majority vote" when you mean "won the election with under 50%" is bound to confuse people.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority definition 1.c

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I am not making this up, majority vote and popular vote are literal phrases used to describe the results. Please look it up. I agree it’s confusing.
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I know you're not making it up, "plurality" is a real word and in a technical context "majority" can be contrasted with "plurality". But even then you really wouldn't say "lost the majority vote" for someone who won an election (try searching for that phrase: none of the hits are people using it like you are).
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The majority vote is being used often to indicate whether or not majority actually voted in a given President. In the USA however, majority vote win happens infrequently nowadays, only 4 out of last 9 elections with winner won a majority vote. so perhaps unfair to bring that up, the 2024 was an absolute blowout by USA's standards
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Why are you assuming your interlocutor is in favor of Elon or Trump holding their positions? If anything, one should assume he is consistently against all three men being in positions of influence.
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>Why are you assuming your interlocutor is in favor of Elon or Trump holding their positions?

Doesn't matter if he is. He presents it as some kind of big issue that "No one of character can respect or trust him anymore", which even if true had almost zero impact for all other CEOs doing the same and worse.

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Most CEOs are fired for this. There are some exceptions sure but there are always exceptions. In reality, an affair with a subordinate is an express ticket to getting fired in Corporate America.
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Only if you get exposed publicly like Huang, and sometimes not even then.

Otherwise nobody gives a shit and it happens all the time. 1. Larry Ellison had several affairs with employees. Elon Musk with at least 1 reported by WSJ. Eric Schmidt. And those are just the biggest profile tech ones.

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fair, but I don’t see any other hot stories crashing a company over a horny CEO. funny how we bring in some moral high ground selectively. if we did this as a whole there wouldn’t be many CEOs or Presidents left in their position, no?
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CEOs of Intel, McDonalds, Nestle all fell after similar things came to light.
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all three had explicit policies that CEOs violated. if nvidia has the same the ousting should be straight-forward. though I am sure Boards will find loophole in the policy (e.g. "she was not a direct subordinate") if they want to keep CEO around
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>> Under Nvidia's code of conduct, employees are instructed to avoid actual or potential conflicts of interest, with "personal relationships" specifically identified as a possible source of such conflicts.

>> The code applies to all employees and board members and provides for disciplinary action, including termination, for violations.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/report-nvidia-ceo-had...

Seems pretty clear cut

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Elon is a despicable human being. But you should know his children are usually conceived via IVF, not naturally.

Secondly, no one sane defends our pedophile president so not sure why you bring that up as supporting fact.

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77,303,573 did in 2024 election
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those were not all votes of support, like last week was mostly not about supporting democrats
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Thanks for making sure this discussion didn't pass without some classic whataboutism. You're a great service to the people on this site. Keep it up.
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    > In 2012, Krizhevsky, Sutskever, and Hinton used Nvidia GPUs and CUDA to train AlexNet, whose breakthrough performance helped ignite the modern deep learning boom.
didn't the very early deep learning frameworks use opengl and shader constructs? I recall reading something to that effect.
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If my memory right, it was around time when opengl allowed programmable shaders to render to texture. It was limited to floating point numbers and very short programs.
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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.

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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.
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GPGPU computing massively predates both Cuda and OpenCL
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Visionaries you can get a dime a dozen. Worshipping individuals like this is not healthy.
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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.

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Nvidia made that idea possible by making GeForce 3 in 2001, we experimented with GPGPU because Nvidia already created the opportunity. And at the time, using a tiny specialized fraction of GPUs (of all things) for general-purpose computation was an absolutely ridiculous idea never taken seriously by most people, even us doing it.
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> 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?

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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.
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AI is strategic, so the government pays for it behind the curtain. Everything the government buys is taken out the hands of the poorest people. The rest pays more for what is left.

This simply shows how the real tax is government spending, not how it gets the money. It can "tax the rich", print money, or take debt, but when it spends, it takes your computer, your fuel, your house, your car, your furniture, and your food.

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I think we are yet to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.
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> 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.

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You describe why Jensen WAS critical for Nvidia and the industry.
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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.
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> by cutting his salary and stock to 0 for 2 years

That's less than a slap on the wrist.

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Sure, and Jobs was a visionary for launching the iPhone, yet Apple has still done incredibly well under Cook
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He had a nice jacket but I think it was Ian Buck that was actually useful?
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They should also give him a slap on the wrist while they're at it
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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.
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Thank you for the insight, Claude.
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The man cannot even keep his pants secure - how can he secure GPUs from being smuggled?
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Sleep with a subordinate. Sleep with Chinese spy. Sell export restricted chips to Chinese shell company (likely knowingly). Lobby on behalf of China.
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If he knowingly violated US export restrictions then that's something for the US government to look in to.
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What is firable in your view then?

I dont like this crummy idea that you can do no wrong as long as stock price increases.

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There should be harm to shareholders. If the US investigates and found that export control laws have been violated and fines Nvidia $X billion then that's harm.
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I mean, shares a down a lot, at least some is attributable to his behavior, so there was very direct harm.
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Short-term share prices are not a good metric for anything. Shares were down significantly even before this news, and that was because of concern that datacenters will be banned by newly elected politicians.
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He was lobbying on behalf of shareholders. In case you didn't know, we want him selling every last chip at the highest price possible.
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No one is irreplaceable
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This is some AI-generated slop.
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>Here's why

stopped reading

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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.

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> 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

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Here’s why Jensen needs to go:

I’m a gamer and I want my fucking GPUs back.

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You would never have had them in the first place without him. Say your thanks first before you kick him out the door.
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