And anyway, whether Nvidia created CUDA and deep learning are all moot at this point.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"...
Violation sanctions, and likely knowingly, is not good for Nvidia.
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.
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.
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.
But if what they discovered wasn’t usable in a prosecution, pressuring the board with his affairs isn’t unthinkable.
And this is an obvious example.
Except, it happens frequently and most of the time people ignore it. In practice, it is accepted most of the time.
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.
Who cares?
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.
Wasn't it Anthropic or OpenAI that sent a warning about this exact possibility to regular employees?
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.
Whether you think that outweighs everything else is a distinct argument, but the two things aren't mutually exclusive.
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.
If that was the case, IMO he wouldn't have come this far.
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
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.
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.
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.
That argument doesn't hold water given everything Elon has done.
Heck Elon also slept with an exec. No one cared.
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.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/18h7k9g/ho...
If you don't see how secret affairs with spies and employees impacts the company then you're being willfully ignorant.
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.
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.
The evidence is their stock being down 8% since the news came out.
How else would you explain that drop?
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.
That was not the case here.
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.
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.
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.
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?
There's more than one kind of shady person.
Yeah no. This doesn't even come close to treason. Treason in the US is incredibly difficult to prove, which is intentional.
Ahh, looks like the midterm results are still smarting!
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".
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.”Why did NVDA fare differently than AMD or Intel?
And almost all of big CEOs sleep with stuff or not-their-wives. Many do worse, think certain private islands...
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.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/majority definition 1.c
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.
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.
>> 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
Secondly, no one sane defends our pedophile president so not sure why you bring that up as supporting fact.
> 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.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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That's less than a slap on the wrist.
I dont like this crummy idea that you can do no wrong as long as stock price increases.
stopped reading
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.
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
I’m a gamer and I want my fucking GPUs back.