Today is a conflicting day for me, considering a scandal about Chinese spying, two extramarital affairs, and corporate hubris have brought down Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia for 33 years.
I haven’t been able to absorb the shock of this moment, as Huang resigned from Nvidia this morning. The stock market has processed the loss, as Nvidia has lost $1.539 trillion in value in the last month and it is no longer the most valuable company in the world.
I also recognize the disappointment, anger, and sense of loss about this event for Huang’s wife, his children, and the extended Nvidia corporate family. I have often taken pride in writing the very first story about Nvidia, back when I was at the San Jose Mercury News and Huang was touting his non-triangle graphics chips as Windows accelerators, before he started wearing black leather jackets.
His company was one of around 80 3D graphics chip design companies that emerged in Silicon Valley and elsewhere to compete as the digital world transformed from 2D to 3D visuals. He rode the wave of gaming graphics and found new uses for the parallel computing tasks in processing for neural networks, which led to AI. And that turned the company into the most valuable in the world, surpassing $5 trillion in value, and it made its game graphics business look puny. He was a celebrity in his native Taiwan.
Yet he engaged in risky behavior, somehow believing he could hide extramarital affairs from all of the cameras that were pointing at him. He has become the butt of jokes and memes. But whatever his personal failings, he should be remembered for the humor and insight he brought to the world of technology. He often gave two-hour keynotes without reading from a script, and he gave a glimpse of his personality when he once showed up on stage in Las Vegas with a $500 poker chip.
I had a chance to interview Jensen many times across the decades while at VentureBeat and GamesBeat, but in recent years the company decided that its PR was best done not with me but the likes of Mad Money, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, and other such tech/financial giants. I applaud the journalists who were able to investigate the truth and come up with the stories that led to the transparency about his behavior unbefitting a CEO. People may remember him most for his fall, but I think it’s also important to realize just who Jensen was in his previous public personae, as he was an important part of technology history and the fables of Silicon Valley.
Appropriately enough, I asked AI to dig out the most interesting interviews I did with Jensen over the decades. Here’s what it came up with below.
I have my own personal favorite quote from Jensen, and while AI found the right interview, it didn’t find the right quote, in my view. The quote was quintessential Jensen in being able to capture the significance of what the company was doing, in a swaggering sort of style. He told me, “I don’t really have to watch science fiction because I’m in science fiction today.”
Here’s the quotes that AI came up with — and I would note there was nothing from the earliest years:
Funniest / Most Jensen
“Smart people focus on the right things.”
In a 2019 AI-related interview, when I joked that VentureBeat’s specialties were gaming and AI, Jensen immediately quipped that smart people focus on the right things. It was classic Jensen: confident, funny, and simultaneously promotional. [gamesbeat.com]
The beard exchange.
During an interview during the COVID pandemic, I mentioned growing a beard and Jensen responded that I looked like a beard guy and were probably happiest playing video games all day during lockdowns. It was one of the more personal and playful openings in our interviews. [venturebeat.com]
The giant graphics card as an oven preheater.
In that same conversation, Jensen joked about the enormous Nvidia GPU being useful for preheating an oven. That became one of the more memorable self-deprecating Nvidia jokes. [venturebeat.com]
Most visionary
AI is the most powerful force of our time.
This became one of Jensen’s recurring themes years before the generative AI boom. He argued that virtually every industry would be transformed by AI. [gamesbeat.com]
There won’t be one metaverse. There will be hundreds.
In 2020, when many people were envisioning a single dominant metaverse, Jensen argued for many different virtual worlds based on different stories, franchises, and communities. [venturebeat.com]
Building Earth-2 leads to the metaverse “for free.”
One of Jensen’s more ambitious ideas was that creating an accurate digital twin of Earth would effectively create much of the required infrastructure for a large-scale metaverse. [gamesbeat.com]
Most revealing
Nvidia is open because that’s why its platform succeeded.
During a discussion about Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm, Jensen argued that Nvidia’s reach comes from broad accessibility rather than lock-in. [gamesbeat.com]
Keep building CPUs, GPUs, and DPUs.
After the Arm deal collapsed, Jensen’s response was essentially: strategy unchanged. Build all three major computing engines and keep moving forward. It was a very Jensen answer, pragmatic and direct. [gamesbeat.com]
The future is many AIs, not one AI.
Back in 2016, when singularity discussions were common, Jensen argued that the world would be filled with specialized AIs rather than one superintelligence. In hindsight, that prediction aged remarkably well. [venturebeat.com]
Most “Jensen Huang”
AI told me that if there were three lines that capture Jensen’s personality from our interviews, they would be:
- The “smart people focus on the right things” crack. [gamesbeat.com]
- The prediction that there would be hundreds of metaverses, not one. [venturebeat.com]
- The insistence after the Arm failure that Nvidia should simply keep building CPUs, GPUs, and DPUs. [gamesbeat.com]
Those combine humor, conviction, and long-term vision, which is probably why Huang has always been such a good interview subject.
The top 10 list
Here’s a list for the headlines and URLs for the interviews.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang interview: From the Grace CPU to engineer’s metaverse
https://gamesbeat.com/jensen-huang-interview-from-the-grace-cpu-to-engineers-metaverse-of-the-omniverse/
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang weighs in on the metaverse, blockchain, chip shortage, Arm deal, and competition
https://venturebeat.com/games/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-weighs-in-on-the-metaverse-blockchain-chip-shortage-arm-deal-and-competition/
Why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says this is generative AI’s moment
https://venturebeat.com/games/why-nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-this-is-generative-ais-moment/
Jensen Huang interview: Why AI is the single most powerful force of our time
https://gamesbeat.com/jensen-huang-interview-why-ai-is-the-single-most-powerful-force-of-our-time/
Nvidia’s CEO discusses AI dangers, Donald Trump, the Nintendo Switch, and more
https://venturebeat.com/games/nvidias-ceo-on-everything-from-ais-dangers-to-donald-trump-and-the-nintendo-switch/
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the Metaverse, permanent WFH, and accelerating raises
https://venturebeat.com/business/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-on-the-metaverse-working-from-home-permanently-and-raises-for-workers/
Jensen Huang interview: Nvidia’s post-Arm strategy, Omniverse, and self-driving cars
https://gamesbeat.com/jensen-huang-interview-nvidias-post-arm-strategy-omniverse-and-self-driving-cars/
Jensen Huang interview: How the metaverse vision will outlast any economic downturn
https://gamesbeat.com/jensen-huang-interview-how-the-metaverse-vision-will-outlast-any-economic-downturn/
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang goes off script with CES 2018 Q&A
https://venturebeat.com/ai/nvidia-jensen-huang-goes-off-script-with-ces-2018-qa/
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang interview — Antitrust, openness, and the PC-console war
https://gamesbeat.com/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-interview-antitrust-openness-and-the-pc-console-war/