Reflecting on Leadership and Sacrifice

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It was embarrassing, It was humiliating Your employees are probably embarrassed for you. In fact, you know, right now, it is really quite hard for me to resurface those feelings. And the reason for that is I spend all of my time all of my life trying to forget yesterday, right What did they teach athletes? Forget the last point. Yeah. It's about forgetting Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built Gy Ross and on the show today, how Jensen Wong went from making graphics chips for gamers Powering the AI Revolution builduilding the biggest company. in the world. If Nvidia were a country, it would be one of the five richest in the world. just behind the US and China Nvidia's value is now more than the entire economic output of Japan or the UK, or France. That's how big this company is. And it's also probably the single most important company in the world right now. It is the biggest player powering the AI revolution. But NVidA didn't start out that way. The company actually began by selling graphics processors for video games And for a good twenty years, Gamers were NVidia's main customers. But back in the two thousands, the company's co founder, Jensen Wang made a pretty important bet, a bet that those graphics processors known as GPUs, could actually do a lot more than just power video games. He believed these processors could be the cornerstone for the future of supercomputing. This was a very bold and very expensive idea. Now bear with me for a moment here because if you're not super familiar with the technical terms around AI and computing, I will do my best to explain. So think of a computer kitchen. The CPU or central processing unit is like a master chehef. It's really smart, it can do almost anything, but it can only cook a small number of dishes at a time. The GPU or graphics processing unit is like a kitchen with thousands of line cooks. Each one isn't as talented as the chef, but together, these guys can crank out thousands of simple tasks all at once And that to make that kitchen do even more, Jensen poured billions of dollars into developing a platform and software layer uta which is basically the instruction manual that lets you use all those line cooks in entirely new ways So what KUA basically did is turn the GPU from a video game tool into a general purpose supercomputer The problem with it though, is that it was way ahead of its time. On a tiny number of users, mostly university researchers, had any need for it And so every single Nvidia processor sold to a teenager playing video games was actually very sophisticated. And yet that teenager had no need for it And so for nearly a decade, NvIidia was stalled The stock price stayed flat. sometometimes it actually fell And at one point, there were rumors of a hostile takeover bid Many investors were losing faith. A lot of them were dumping the stock And people outside the company were questioning Jensen's obsession with Kuda. But he kept going He withstood massive pressure to move away from it because he really believed in the power of this platform which may be the most remarkable thing about the story Because a decade after NvIidia started this experiment, the bet started to pay off And when it did It was like every slot machine in the casino hit at once. Invidious Chips found a massive new market in the emerging world of artificial intelligence And today, Nvidia is at the center of it their chips dominate the computing power needed to power AI So how did Jensen Wong see it coming did he believe that others didn't? And what does he think about where all this is going That's what I wanted to find out when I sat down with him at Nvidia headadquarters in Santa Clara, California. Jensen Wang was born in Taiwan in the early nineteen sixties He spent some of his childhood in Thailand and when he was about nine years old His parents started to get worried about political unrest in Thailand decided to move to the U S They sent Jensen and one of his brothers ahead of the rest of the family to what they thought was a normal boarding school And there weren't that many boarding schools in America that would take international students, but someomehow, Oita Baptist Institute Kentucky, Clay County, Kentucky littleittle tiny toail. Stop light And there was a school on this small small mound. kind of a small hill Probably the most important feature was that it was a boarding school and it was incredibly affordable Yeah because my parents, you know, didn't have much money. and And so we went there and every kid that live there had to work. and so they had no custodians And so we were, you know where we took care of ourselves and My job was to clean the bathrooms Apparently I was the youngest kid that ever went there I still am, I think Beuse you were ten. I was nine when I went thereo. I've got great memories of it. I love the place It was a tough school because they invited kids from all walks of life. Yeah. And so I was nine and my roommate was sixteen. and so None of the closet had doors and none of the drawers because everything had to be out the open. you just don't know what the kids are going to have Yeah. So Welcome to Mury. Yeah, R. But I loved it. It was incredible. I was on the swim team and the soccer team and then afterwards. The coach would take you out to give you a treat And um I remember recording, we used to record a tape and we send it back to our parents You know, we didn't long distance phone calls cost too much money. and so we never spoke to them live or until they came to the United States almost two years later. And so we would record, you what happened this last month And I remember I remember telling them that after a swim meet Coach took us to this incredible restaurant and lights everywhere's like from outer space and food was in boxes. It' McDonald's. It's McDonald's Yeah. Which was magical. Yeah, inccredible. ye. yeah. You eventually reunite with your family in Poland, which is where your dad settles and then grew up there And you went on to this is the early late seventies earies. you go to Oregon state. And this is like the beginning of what would become the computer revolution. You are studying electr engineering, becausecause I don't think they had a computer science program there at the time. And that's also where you would meet the person who would become your wife Yeah, so When I was in high school I wasn't very outgoing and so I didn't have that many friends All of my best friends were in two clubs. One club was the math club and then the other club was the computer club. Nice. It was the same, you know four kids.ame guys. Yeah, same four kids and my best friend In high school, I asked him, you know, where he was going to college and he's at Oregon State And he asked me where I was going to college and It never crossed my mind to go anywhere out of town for, you know the idea of going to a great university never crossed my mind. And so he said he was going to Oregon State. I said, Yeahah, that sounds great. I'll go to Oregon State. And so we were roommates. There we both enrolled in electrical engineering and our lab The class had two hundred must have two hundred and fifty kids. It was a big class And there were three girls you know, and so I know this Lorie is a super pretty girl and I was probably the youngest kid in class then as well. I skipped two grades in school. so We were in lab together and I found a way to arrange myself into the same lab as her, same group as her and Andntil we became lab partners and here we are. Both of you after you graduate moved to California. This is like nineteen eighty fourish, I think which is the center of the revolution, right? I mean, your first job was with AMD And I think she also had a job Silicon graphics. Silicon Graphic. Yeah But what did it look like to design computer chips in nineteen eighty four. I mean Cad was what did that look what did that actually physically entail? Yeah. well, at the time, I was the last generation of chip designers that did it by hand And the first generation of chip designers that use software to design chips. that ran into computers, that ran software. And so It was an incredible time You know, it's kind of the print perspective at the time, the chip I was working on had a few thousand Transistors And now we design ships that are two hundred billion a trillion transistors.e Yeah. So The scale of the problems that we work on now compared to where we started is incredible But anyhow, My office mate went off to work for a startup company called LSlogic And she called me and said, Hey, you know, um This is really quite a special company. You ought to come take a look And so I went to take a look at LSI Logic, and it turned out this is an extraordinary company and completely revolutionary in what they were doing. really in a lot of ways, invented the modern way of doing design the way of designing ships. And so I joined them, I guess I was, you know, probably employee number one hundred fifty or one hundred seventy or something like that. And you were like twenty two probably at the time. Yeah, I was just a kid. I was just a kid, yeah And from what I' like from what I've read, I mean, they gave you a lot of responsibility. I mean, they they I mean, you were eventually, you would be in charge of tooling, right? Like that was sort of Yeah, what you oversaw The way L theylologics business worked is they had all the technology, the tools and they made the chips But they would make it for somebody else who created computers. And so some microsystems and silicon graphics incredible companies at the time in Silicon Valley who were systems companies, but they needed a chip company to help them build the chips. And so So the CEO of LSILogic recognized my talents and put me in front of all these companies to help them. And I met some incredible people I mean, you were This was sort of like the PC boom, the Cone Wars. I mean, there was a lot of demand for what LSI was producing, right? I mean It was an exciting to be here to be young and to watch you know, probably that next most exciting time would happened with the internet boom, right ESI Logic was an extraordinary company because It happened at precisely the time, exactly as you're saying guy, that M computers, many super compomuters, supercomputers All of those types of giant systems were being created by companies like Digital or And then the PC Revolution started And so I was really in the right place at the right time and I saw newew industries being created. I saw a lot of great startups I was able to see see firsthand, you know, companies being built and Yeah Great technology, bad strategy moderate technology, excellent strategy. I saw all it was quite an incredible thing. And of course I met Chris and Curtis Those people Curtis Pream, and Chris Mal and Chris Malris. We're at Sun The story is that these guys wanted to create at some microsystems a a chip for specific computer graphics for computer graphics for games and were rebuffed. And so as often as the case, they decided to start their own company. And they approached you and they wanted you to work with them. And this is around nineteen ninety two, ninety three. From what I understand, I mean, you had a great job. You were well paid. You were well on the path to upper management. This could have been a great, stable career. You already had I think, at least one kid Yeah from Madison. Yeah. And your wife was looking after the kids. so everyone depended on your salary You know, I think we had a whopping thirty thousand dollars in a bank Um When they initially approached you, I mean, did you think that I'm not going to take that risk? I'm not going to leave this amazing job Yeah, I mean they, um But they didn't give up asking me 'cause they wanted you to run there business that they had an idea for them. Yeah But I think in the end, what we got excited about probably just a piece of revolution in the end that Here's the first time a computer was going to be general purpose and You're going to use it for all kinds of different applications If it had computer graphics like what people were seeing with Jurassic Park and Silicon graphics and If we could figure out a way to make it affordable and architect something that would fit into a personal computer architecture You know, maybe there's a company here But I mean, at the time, there were like sixty companies trying to do this. Right. And so was there any part of you, do you remember any part of you thinking What if this doesn't work out Now. I should have. It didn' it didn't really. You were hired for whatever happened would happen. Yeah Maybe that's what's called vision. Mbe maybe that's determination come from. But andia manifested in my mind that and an industry manifested in my mind that that was so crystal clear never once did it Cross my mind and when to work out So Nvidia is the company, which I guess comes from the Latin word envy NvIDia. and guys start working on the first product. which is going to be a revolutionary graphics processing chip that is going to make We were the first three D graphics company in the world that started with the idea that we would bringing three D graphics to consumers. Yeah And so nineteen ninety three, it's founded and you start to work on this product and you guys raise a little bit of money to do it. And this is going to be a game changer, right? I mean, this is going to be like the coolest thing. Yeah, we thought so The technology that we created allowed us to generate images But using a lot less electronics, a lot fewer chips and a lot more affordable than these giant supercomputers that Silicon Gravics was making at the time you know, at the time the computer that generated the images for for Jurassic Park would cost you know a million dollars at a time. And we needed to get something to fit into about three hundred bucks. And so that gap was so large that We had to reinvent the algorithms altogether e people got very excited about it. This is the NV one. a chip. Yeah, we sold two hundred fifty thousand I've now You know, I believe you could sell two hundred fifty thousand of almost anything But the algorithm didn't really work. And so we received two hundred fifty thousand back. I mean, it all came back It was not just our less, it was a disaster Yeah, it was probably a technology disaster as great of a technology disaster ever seen. you know, I think the The right architecture, the right algorithm is inverse texture mapping. Ours what was called for texture mapping att this point There were probably twenty thirty three D graphics companies and they were all doing it the right way And we're the only one doing it this weird way? And Microsoft has about to announce Windows ninety five And Windows ninety five has a API, called directX And directX does it the right way. And we were incompatible with direct dex. And so anyways We chose some approaches that were just fundamentally wrong I've read that that understandably create a lot of tension with you and your co founders because It was two and a half years of work and And from what I also understand all the architecture that you'd created for the next NV two and NV three was based on NV one on NV one. And so I imagine, I mean, do you remember The three of you just going at it Yeah, well The arguments, the argument was pretty stressful because we were u We had a contract with a company called SeGa The video games surely And they contracted us for twelve million dollars in nineteen ninety five, nineteen ninety four. And they were guaranteed to buy the NB two and the NB three. Yeah to use it for our game console, the Sega game console And so we were contracted to do that already and we had invested two and a half years. And so the question is, how do we deal with this contract If we cancel the contract, how does the company stay alive And if we don't cancel a contract You know, the company doesn't go out of business And so there's the argument of, let's not cancel a contract Let's keep on going thenen of course, that there's the argument contontract is based on an architecture that is fundamentally flawed And so why finish something the wrong way. And it would have burnnt another two years And in two years time, thirty other companies were so far ahead of us doing it the right way, willll never catch up And so this was the line And If we decide to change the architecture, We've got to go cancel the contract And so I went to Japan And I contacted the CEO. A Sega. Sega. His name is Iirra Majerie And I told him My recommendation for you is that Sega finds another partner build the three D graphic system or their next game console. I have request, however that even though we're not finishing the contract still needed the money Be if we didn't have the money, the company would be out of business. And I really believe the company deserves to succeed And so I asked him if you would convert the rest of the contract to an investment in our company And he says, But Jensson, you know, your company' like has thirty competitors, you're most likely going to go out of business. I don't even know what your business plan is. And I' like, I tell you, I'm not sure what my business plan is. but my first job as the CEO is to make sure we don't go out of business. and we've got to get the technology in the right track. And if you could help me with this I think we'll figure out a way and I think it's going to be a great investment Anyways He talked to his board and they turned the rest of the five million dollars of investment or contract into our investment in our company. I took that five million dollars and we came back And I was incredibly grateful. came back and here we are. The company was a little bit too big. I had to cut it back in half. You' like a hundred, two hundred and fifty people or. L almost, yeah. And so I cut it back to h Be you to hire all these people anticipating NV one, NB two, NB three. It was going to be successful, Right And we're going to get all these Sega games, all these console games into the PC industry. So anyways, I laid off two Thursday at a company And it was incredibly hard to do And also you now had to focus on making the NV three, which was a new chip that would actually work. And I mean I mean, to be clear, you needed to do this, not only to compete with all the other companies out there, but basically to save yourselellves, right to save NvidDia Yeah, well, look it's scary. It's scary even now You're asking me You know, these are traumatic experiences thirty three years ago And u So so we decided, okay, first Let's just decide to do things the right way We don't actually know how to do it the right way And then the next problem I have is that we have five million dollars, but by the time thatbt We were done designing the chip The company would have ran on money before the chip comes back And the juice are being made in TMC By this point, you had already you started working with TSMC in Taiwan because initially Your chips are made in Europe, I think. That's right right. The capacity wasn't there So you had to move it. So this is like around ninety seven, you start to shift production to Taiwan. That's right. And you who'd run out of money before they were able to produce them. That's right. And so the problem was Back in the old days you would design the chip The chip comes back, you will write the software for the chip fix whatever bugs you found and then you would make the trip again And that would go around a couple times. Yeah. And back in the old days It would take about a year and a half to two years to design a ship and get it to work and ship into production Well, we didn't have a year and a half We had about six months. We were on fumes. said you had no choice. You had to do. The chip had to be right. Which means you couldn't do all of the processes. We couldn't iterate. Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't protype. And how did you know it was going to work And so we heard about this company ICOS was building an emulator And this incredible machine, this giant machine pretretend to be your chap And so you would take all of your software and put it into this machine And this machine would pretend to be the chip and you would plug this machine into a PC and run the software. So you could see how it work. So you could see how it would work. It was super tight accurate Well, supposedly, Ands so And so I called the company and I said, Hey, listen I heard you guys have this machine called emmulator I would like to buy one And they said, Well, that's terrific, but unfortunately, we had no customers said we're going out of business. We have this one that's left over If you want, you could buy it out of, you know the creditor who now owns it And so we did. We bought this leftover piece of machinery from this company that ultimately went out of business And, um I took half of our company's money, so we were already running on fumes And so I cut that life short even further ' got money bought this machine that Nobody else wanted to buy brought to the company I said here we are We've got to put Nvidious chip. MB three, we have a one twenty eight. into this machine Ebody say this is crazy. I mean, the is nuts. You're taking half the money. I mean, you're the CEO. We don't even have that was the money we had was already not enough Yeah. And we took half of that and spent it. But these engineers who were used to a process, right? and used to a way of doing things You're basically saying, we're going to put it in the emulator and that's going to be it. and then we're going to fabrication. I mean, did anybody say, this is not a good idea It was the only idea we had I gotta tell you, I don't I didn't remember anybody objecting to it also didn't remember asking too many people whether they objected to it You know, I think smart engineers reason about things I guess we always knew it was existential. We always knew we were going out of business I just remember us being super calm. suuper focused And we just step by step by step reason that it was the only chance for us to be That had to work. It had to be You this is I don't know if it's apocphal or but I think it's true you were known to say at that time, our company is thirty days away from goingo out of business. Yeah. and it kind of became a a meme and a mantra for a while, but it was true. I mean, you were so this had to work This thing had to work. And we I'm not revealing any secrets. It did work. It did actually work. mostostly But enough to good enough to sa the company Yeah enough to save the company When we come back in just a moment, Jensen identifies a whole new market for NIidA, a market that does not yet exist. Tay with us, I'm Guy Ros, and you're listening to how I built this. uort for today's episode comes from Square easy way for business owners to take payments, book appointments, manage staff, and keep everything running in your business. without running yourself into the ground In my neighborhood, there's a shop that sells incredible locally made food breads, prepared meals, sauces, jams, all from producers within an hour's drive And they use Square. 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So it's the late nineteen nineties and NvIidia has escaped extinction by using an unproven machine to test its latest chip And as it turns out, that new chip, the Reivo one hundred and twenty eight is a hit whichich means the company can now write its next chapter We're one hundred percent focused on the gaming industry We were the first computer graphics company ever created to focus on one application industry fully, which was video games. So the way we saw the world that the chip is important But ultimately what makes people happy and what really creates industries is the applications that were on top of the chips that make New things possible. recognizing the importance of application developers or game developers so that we can help them realize the full potential of our chip while we make their application as wonderful as possible U I know I want to just p it for a second because I you know, here you are, you're still a young guy You know, in your late thirties, mid late thirties, running a company is the first time you are the CEO of a company It's not like giving management training or go to business school, which is very normal, right And you kind of had to teach yourself because you have and had a reputation for being like a hard S yelling at people demanding excellence and really just tearing into people when they when you feel like they didn't do great work. But I read that you Stumbled upon this book by Christian Claytonon C Cla C Ch Chiston, forgive, he's no longer alive. Harvard Schoolook called the Innovator Celeb. very important book and it had a huge impact on you. Like you read this book, because he has this example of like Honda. they were making motor scooters for kids and no one was paying attention to them. and so when they started making cars they had this advantage because they could really scale quickly and get out there And you read this book and you were inspired by it. What do you remember about that book that you thought? That's it. This is the thing that I need to think about The single most important thing about technology is The moment it becomes good enough When you overerve the market, you're ready for disruption In fact, at the NVidDA journey every single step of the way We were always the disruptor. So I think the large lesson of Clay Christansen is really about disruption and how technology emerges out of thin air that apparently looks like toys but went off to disrupt large markets If you looked at NvidIious, We even won twenty eight The quality of it was okay Good enough that it disrupted an entire market if you looked at Nvidia's first GPU that was designed for high performance computing. It was not perfect, but it was good enough. so Exple after example after example the way that we went off to revolutionize large industries Initially it looks a little toyish But the outcome has always been the same All right, so I want to jump ahead a little because in the late nineties Nvidia developed a new technology called parallel computing in this basasically gave your chips the ability to perform multiple calculations at the same time, multiple tasks, right This was another gamble because I think a lot of other companies had tried and failed to produce parallel computing chips, right Um, During that time, there were all kinds of different processors being created. And people were trying to come up with new ways of doing computation And then we realized that computer graphics, it was just beautiful, but the world was static It was hard to create beautiful and immersive worlds. And so you really need to find a way to bring physics into that virtual world. So that, you know, waters would flow and, you know Leaves would blow in the wind and explosions would look like explosions And so we would we would try to use the processor which was incredibly parallel to express, you know, the types of algorithms that represent real time physics today. And so That was really the beginning of our journey. down that world of general purpose programmability, meaneanwhile Scientists around the world noticed that Nvidious processors were super powerful Lots of lot multiple things. lot. because you were thinking, okay, this could be used by game designers, maybe in the film industry, which it eventually would be. But still it was like you were thinking beyond people playing video games on their consoles or We would use it for fluid dynamics and image processing and particle physics. And one of the areas that really caught my eye was the whole field of inverse physics or imaging and two doctors. at Mass General we're using are graphics chips to do CT reconstruction And it was during that time other types of techniques for general preurpose computing was coming along. which ultimately led to what we now call CUA All right, so let's jump into this because you launched this project called CUDA or CUDA in roughly two thousand six. And to put this in very basic terms TUA is this platform that makes your graphics chips a lot more versatile, right? And originally, you thought this would be great for scientists and researchers who had to process tons of data But meantime, your customers were gamers. and so they were getting these really sophisticated chips that they didn't really need or use, right? Yeah. And so You just go back to the inspiration that we had at the time that it could be used for a whole bunch of other types of general purpose computation, parallel computing nature computation And image processing could be one of them. you know, there's a whole bunch of them in early experimentation, but none of that. bills Most of those applications were in universities and The researchers, you know, didn't buy too many of them to justify it. And so the only thing that really paid the bills was video games. You understood that the GPU could do something, lots of things That We just had not imagined those things yet Yeah, we knew of some things and during that time, was constantly looking for. algorithms that required parallel computing. I was always looking for algorithms that someomehow only ran on supercomputers, but if we could just figure out a way to bring it into personal computer, its exposure or its ability to reach more people could be incredible. constantly looking for things like that. understand because basically From two thousand six to twenty twelve Your stock price was just either collapsing at times or wasn't moving uh, you had a refund hundredundreds of millions of dollars to people who didn't like the processors. And still there was this conviction in continuing down this path, this Kuda path because you and the people around you believe that there was something there that you couldn't really know exactly what it was It was going to be something. so let's keep investing in this. And I'm trying to get into just this space of how you were dealing with, you know publicly traded company, your stock price was terrible. You probably had a lot of pressure from investors What made you and the people that you worked with say, we're going to keep our heads down and keep going 'cause it was a long time. We're talking six, seven, eight years on this thing that nobody understood and was and had zero zero, but very little commercial success. Well, that's when CEOs had to be CO's We believed on first principles. This should be quite useful and I had to believe that It's quite useful. Now the question is what's the strategy for creating this new architecture for computing that everybody would be able to enjoy And the problem with computer architectures is this chicken or the egg problem? Let's say you cate a brand new architecture is incredible. It's the most amazing thing in the world But computers are built to run software And if your install base is not large enough, it doesn't attract software. Developers because developers want to program on large install base computers like iPhone and PC And so the problem is Even though we believed that this architecture was going to be incredible, that Cuda was going to be everywhere or could be everywhere. How do you get it everywhere And if you don't get it everywhere, how do you attract the developer And if you had no developers, who would write the killer app? And if there' no killer app, then why would people buy it And so the answer was very simple. It was literally sitting in front of us And it just required enormous sacrifice The answer was, let's use GFce, which is the GPU that is now everywhere in the world used for playing video games. Yeah And let's have GFce carry on its back. Tuda to every single computer in the world Now, of course, by doing so, our gross margins would go from bad to horrible Okay, well, let's get past that Let's not worry about the fact that it's going to be years. I know You never think that it's nobody ever thinks it's that long And I thought it was going to be next year it' going to be okay. and then next year is going to be okay, and next year is going to be okay Nonetheless. The cost was incredible in Karing Cuda And we couldn't charge anybody for it And so we gave it away Meanwhile, we started up programs to reach out to every single university We evangelized CQUA. We flew everywhere around the world to pitch CUTA whenever you can. Meanwhile G forces was taking Kuta out to the world. Yeah. And so the hope was that someday some software company or some researcher or probably a lot of them eventually would know how to use KUDa and they would take advantage of it because it's sitting right there on GFce Was there ever any thought in your mind that maybe we're too early? We might be the ones who actually make this revolutionary technology, but we might not be the ones to bring it to the prromised land Yeah, all the time. But that's, you know Then there was nine hundred other smart strategies and You know, the list of new ideas that we came up with to keep the company alive and You know, successful for just another few more days and it was countless And so you're solving the problem both in making sure that you stay alive long enough to proliferate this technology everywhere, looking for every possible way You're making it easier and easier for people to use this technology. You're teaching people to do it. You're talking to software developers and you're saying, hey, You know that imaging software that you had? Maybe Photoshop, for example, or some video imaging system for broadcast. Could we modify that so that it runs on Kuda? And we're I mean, but we're enough people adopting it to makeake it seem viable GFce kept the li out and just didn't do it very well. You know, we were always under pressure because Unlike other our competitors, they didn't have to carry Cuda on its back. GFce carried CUA on its back For literally twenty five years now. And people were using this product and not even knowing what it could be. Not one day ye It was just all sitting there except for a scientist Except for researchers and universities that heard about CUTA and said, Oh, all you have to do is go buy GFce But then at this point, I mean everything was about to change for Nvidia. Because in the early two thousand ten s, a group of researchers in Toronto But two Nvidia gaming GPUs, right or G forces They plugged them into a computer and a bedroom, and then they trained a neural network to recognize images way better than any computer I'd ever done before And this was essentially the beginning of the AI boom, right? So when you found out about that What do you remember? I mean, do you remember thinking, this is what we've been waiting for for fifteen years Well, we At that time, several different groups reached out to us to ask us for help. on using CUa to accelerate deep learning. And the reason for that was because there was a contest coming up for a computer vision called ImageNet And they were all developing similar techniques. Nidk wanted to use CUDA Instead of using CPU's, which would have taken thousands of CPUs CPU is one task at a time. One task at a time, and they could use our GPU's with just a few GPUs, maybe a couple of them running simultaneously on CUDA, maybe they could train these deep learning models a lot faster a lot more cost effectively. And so they reached out all the same time. and The leap over previous generation algorithms were so significant It really caught my eye. And so we asked ourselves, you know, what is this thing about And where can it go from here What is the implication to our chips? What's the implication to computers? And so like we do with everything, you know, reason about U the so whats which led to a lot of other good decisions There was a weekend, I guess in twenty thirteen where you sent a note out and essentially said we're now an AI company Friday you were focus on the game. I mean, because The majority of your business was still Gaming Maybe people who were doing three D animation and doing graphics for films, that was a pretty significant source of your customer base. but now you are saying, well We are becoming a different company Yeah, and the process kind of goes like what I was explaining earlier As I do with everything, I break things down to first principles and And you ask yourself, what did I learn? Why is it impactful What are the foundations of this technology that made it effective Cennet Do more than this How far can this algorithm go What is the implication to our computer industry? So you just got to go through all of that. You know, it's no different than than somebody writing a business plan about something except, you know, this is kind of how my brain's wired for almost everything I'm good at connecting dots, good at system thinking And you know, I came to the conclusion that this This could be a really significant future direction for the company and Long before I would send out an email that declares something already Th through tens of engagements with different groups. Each one of the groups have already been brought along. So by the time that I sent an email to the company integrating everything, everybody's already been brought along. and so it just kind of tends to be my my management style, but at some point I will you know, set a direction for the company cururious again about stress management and conviction like I wonder how you personally dealt with that. I mean, there were periods of time where you and obviously other people believe in the potential of this thing. Like the capacity is going to be enormous But we just have to stay the course and nothing is really moving for a while. I mean, it's going to take a long time, but you don't know that. You have a crystal ball. I mean, are you just comfortable with that level of stress? or I mean, do you feel Be you don't strike me as somebody who was saying, We're going to be the biggest company. We're going to be the masters of Not going out of business is always high on my list. Yeah. Yeah showing up in life. Matters align Showing up every single day matters a lot Guy, I I guess um To me, it's not that complicated There's a lot of unknowns And being a CEO, you're dealing with mostly unknowns and I'm very comfortable with the nns The first thing you have to do is to the best of your ability, reason about You know, what it is that we're doing And what do we believe in I deeply believed and because I deeply believe it, I help everybody else believe it and I really believe they believed it And then of course We don't want to dedicate our lives to go work on something that the worldready already have I don't our company working on things to capture share from somebody un market, we want to take their share. And so let's go and fight to the bitter end and when your share point goes up by a point, you celebrate with joy and I mean, I just don't find any joy in. That wasn't interesting. It was about It going in a completely different direction. Creating something that's really, really hard. And I believe if it works, it would make such an extraordinary impact It was not hard to stay the course It would have been harder to give up You know, I think that because you believe so deeply in something, it's already manifested fully in my head. I imagine everybody using it. G forces carried it to everybody's computer. Everybody has KUa inside their PC And so the question is Not to me whether we would succeed The only question is when and who is going to be the first application Let me come back in just a moment, Nvidia becomes a major player on the world stage. And Jensen reflects on the future of AI and on his own reluctance to reflect on himself Stay with us, I'm Guy Ros, and you're listening to how I built this Whether you're starting a website from the ground up or thinking about a complete overhaul Framer is a complete website platform that can help launch and keep on improving your site in one place. 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I'm Guy Rz So it's twenty thirteen, and NVvidia is now pivoting away for making chips for gaming to making chips for AI And as the technology takes off, NVidia starts to soar R along with it And I'm going jump back to the part of the story that's familiar to all of us because lived it, by twenty twenty two, Chat GBT and Claude start to transform the workplace in our daily lives Massive data centers go up around the world And most of them are full of Nvidia chips. NvIidia becomes the biggest company in the world and has as much influence on world affairs as some countries, maybe most countries just to stay the obvious here A lot of that can feel D disconerting You know, you're well aware of lots of people who have a lot of worry about this. I mean, Jeffrey Hinton, one of the earliest users of your you've used to train these networks They've signed a letter saying, you know there's a famous letter came out May of twenty twenty three saying lookook, to quote mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal scale risks such as pandemics, nuclear war Signed by Bill Gates and Sam Open and Darry I would and many, many others You didn't sign this letter and you have been really clear that you are not worried about it, you think a lot of this is alarmism, a lot of the conversation around AI and how it's going to take over our jobs and can manipulate, you know, all kinds of things. U Why do you think the people who are making those warnings wrong I think the first thing that everybody should do is the take the science fiction and the Hollywood versions of artificial intelligence and set that aside. and come back to a sensible understanding of what a computer is compomuters, it's software. It is not conscious. Having said all that I think we all everybody wants the same thing, that the technology evolves in a safe way. I am worried about it. And so the question is, how do you channel your worry? What are you worried about Well, we have to build the technology safely. And so Could you imagine if the auto industry every single day told you The car is going to kill lots of people It's their job to make the car safer. Yeah. Channel their worry towards making the car safer I don't think it's helpful for the airline industry to tell you. that every single day, if the plane fails, it would crash out of the sky. All of those narratives are not helpful. But they're coming from the people who are making some of this technology. I guess I've gotten a different perspective on why it is that they're doing that. Maybe it's because they want the world to realize The technology they invented was so powerful It's a celebration of their own achievements Maybe they are genuinely scared themselves. and that they believe that only they can create a technology and keep it safe ignoring the fact that There are millions of innovators around the world who are thinking about AI safety, AI security and building technology for AIfety and AI security There were even attitudes that that we ought to slow down AI innovation. which I believe is exactly the opposite. We had to speed up AI innovation because through innovation, we can make the technology safer, more secure And obviously it's proven to be true The fact that it matter is the AI technology of today more grounded on truth, it hallucinates less. It lies less. and all of that technology I needed to be invented And so my single greatest worry is that the United States doesn't take advantage of the technology. because we scared everybody What do you mean Right now, the sentiment for AI in the United States is lower than most countries. because the message is it's going to take your job It's going to take your job, it's going to be existential threat is going to go into a singularity and it'll be the end of the world. you think that conversation's only happening? here or W far by far. I travel the world by far in the West is really out of control And I think we're doing oursel dis service. Let me give you an example. So a decade ago. Somebody said, listen The first profession that's going to be wiped out is radiology. Yeah. And the reason for that is because the first model that was invented was used for computer vision. Computer vision is used would be trained to read radiology scans better than any humans can And therefore, no radiologist will be necessary. Well, it turns out they were absolutely right, one hundred percent right AI has now completely revolutionized radiology. Every single radiologist uses AI to study the scans. It does it incredibly fast, incredibly accurately, better than a human can However Radiologists demand has gone up the number of patients that we're able to take care of The number of scans has now grown because' cheaper because it's cheaper and faster, and therefore you want to do more scans so that you can do a better job diagnosing disease What is fundamentally missed is that a job purpose and a task. The task is to study the radiology, the scans. Purpose is to diagnose disease It turnurns out hospitals are now see more patients. generating more revenues which enables them to support more patients and they need to hire more radiologists. Now, where's the harm The harm could be that by well known experts declaring the end of an entire profession. Who' going to go into radiology? So young people who wanted to be in radiology decided that this profession is completely obsolete and therefore don't come in. What happens? The world doesn't have enough radiologists? As a result, we brought h So you're saying the conversation we're having here is very binary in the United States. like we're saying It's going to be this or this. And so The argument you're making is that there's a lack of imagination. So for example, you know, I've got a son who's going to go to college next year, right? And so a lot of the conversations, what are these kids going to do in five years or are the jobs going to be? I mean, if law firms are using AI for discovery, Consulting firms are using AI for you what an entry level job would be a finance, et cetera, et cetera. Would you argue that that's a lack of imagination that we actually are reaching those conclusions because we can't think beyond That scenario Hartlely I believe the opportunities the potential for our new college grad in computer science or computer engineering or software engineering or chip design today is far far greater then the opportunities and potential when I came out of school. the tools they have to work with billion times more capable It's super highly automated already today. And yet busier than ever, and the reason for that is because We have ideas of the things that we want to build that we didn't conceive of at the time without the tools that we have AI is going to help this next generation of new college grads achieve greater things, build greater things not take their jobs for us to scare them into Not even want to go to college Okay, Not even wanted to be a computer scientist disservice to society. You're not saving anybody. You're talking a whole bunch of people out of professions that we need in the future And that conversation is not happening in China U they're not buying it They're just not buying it for me mostost harmful thing we could do to our society, our closest families is to scare everybody so that we don't benefit In the next several decades, the other countries will We can't allow that to happen Do you think that there's a possibility that in ten years from now, NVIDia will have an order of magnitude and more employees Before AI or after AI, I don't think it would make any difference. The difference is that with AI along with my employees We're going to have hundreds thousands of AI assistants helping them doing amazing things And so our expectations of our company will be different. Yeah. Things that take ten years, I think'll take one year. And so is that good or bad? It's thrilling. It's exhilarating, I think You know, there's there's just so much of the universe that we don't understand For the first time in history We have the technology to do so We will do in the next several decades what it took humanity several hundred years to achieve Well, as a dad of two boys, I hope you're right I expect to be I know that you don't like talk about speculation. but I read a An excerpt from a new book that's coming out. It's called Defending Taiwan by a writer named Aake Freeman And he paints a scenario of a possible Conflict, hard conflict where, you know, all of a sudden, Taiwan is somehow invaded or occupied, whatever you want to call it, right? And we've seen what, you know We've got some challenges geopolitically right I mean, what part of that, let's just say that scenario is not realistic, that it would be destructive for China as well because their economy really depends on on the US market Um, Do any part of the fact that so such a high percentage of advanced chips, not just in Nidia, but advanced chips are produced in Taiwan Is any part of that? Should people be concerned about that at all? We should always have a resilient supply chain part of building a strong company. And a resilient supply chain has diversity and redundancy b Sometimes you don't have benefit of diversity and redundanance so you make the best you can I think the there are a lot of conflated questions. put into that concern. Yeah. You know, if you ask me, am I concerned about a hot conflict I'm less concerned than most depending on actions of the leaders We may cause The hot conflict And so I am of the opinion that we all must be more long term minded if we can. We ought to have a more balanced and nuanced set of policies, not all or nothing. Don't push your adversaries, don't push your competitors to the wall where they have no choice or where there's no cost to a strategic alternative. And so I think that you know, in, in your question, do I believe it The answer is I don't because I I believe can it happen? Of course, it could happen in everywhere, obviously However I believe in the wisdom of the people involved. What have you had to unlearn as a leader bigaker this company has gotten and the more experience you've gotten, I mean, you You are, you know known for being hard demanding, hard charging, You demand the best out of people. You have yelllded at people, all those things Would you say those things are still how you manage or have youlearned some of those things or have you change some of those things in your style I think people care about style peopleeople care about your values and what you care about So long as you're tough on the same things every time it comes up so long as The moment that it's over, it's over And they know that They're safe, you love them You want them to succeed. This is their life's work and you want it to be as good as it can be Everybody knows that I have enough of everything Whatever it is that anybody thinks they need more of, I've got plenty of it. And yet I work harder than ever And the reason for that is because I want everything that I have they have. I want them to see to realize their dreams. So long as you're pure in high integrity and P they' for them You could be quite challenging to people and they know that you're on their side. you have been on the record as basically saying, you've been asked, wouldould you do this again? Would you do this all over again? And I'm sort of paraphrasing it you s a version of That would no way. Yeah. So can you explain that? I mean we've sort of have the outlines of all of the troughs and there are a lot of troughs. Yeah. And I'm trying to even imagine like end's rough. I've been trying to imagine quarterly earning calls in two thousand seven when your stock priceices is in the toilet and you're prettyting got to tell you, it's embarrass I'm trying to figure out how you can do that publicly traded company withstand the pressure and and, as you say, the embarrassment. It was embarrassing. It was humiliating You're the only face that everybody hates Your employees are probably embarrassed for you. Your question about doing it again You know, most people I just think they're being dishonest. So let me just tell you why. When somebody asks me, would I do this again If your question is Knowing how Nvidia turned out knownowing the contribution we've made to the world Kning the consequence of the company today how it impacts so many different industries. Yeah. All of the benefits that we have accrued as a result of our success Do I love those things? The answer is yes But that wasn't the question You know, The question is, suppose I knew everything. then that I now know how hard it is And all of the pain and suffering and all the embarrassment and humiliation and all the setbacks and you compress all of that And you just told that thirty year old kid Listen. This is going to take a lot longer than you think However fast you thought your company was going to be successful, it's not going to be anything like that And you are going to be the person who delivers most of the most horrific financial return news that anybody' hass ever explained. You know, so on and so forth, you'll be going out of business. you'll be you have to lay people off Would you start again? The answer absolutely not And so I think a lot of people forget that The pain and suffering necessary the endurance necessary to do something great is because you're always looking forward and forgetting the past. Yeah. I spend all my time forgetting yesterday. Yeah. In fact, you know right now, as we're talking It is really quite hard for me to resurface those memories and resurface those feelings. And the reason for that is that I spend all of my time All of my life trying to forget yesterday, right? so that you can get back on that horse That's in fact What did they teach athletes? Forget the last point Yeah It's about forgetting Yeah, I understand. I mean the sacrifice, right? I mean, you've got a family, like you've probably missed a lot of things. You probably did twelve hour days, seven days a week for a years And after you sort of really began to focus on AI, it doubled again. I mean, it was all those things. A true, all true And during the time when the kids were still young, I was finishing my master's at Stanford And so I was busy on multiple levels. and Yeah I missed all their karate tournaments I