{"id":2056,"date":"2026-01-04T10:19:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/?p=2056"},"modified":"2026-01-04T10:19:00","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:19:00","slug":"the-thinking-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2026\/01\/04\/the-thinking-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thinking Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Book review: The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World&#8217;s Most Coveted Microchip, by Stephen Witt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a well-written book about the rise of deep learning, and the man who is the most responsible for building the hardware that it needs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Building the Foundations<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Nvidia was founded in 1993 by three engineers. They failed to articulate much of a business plan, but got funding anyway due to the reputation that Jensen had developed while working for LSI Logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For 20 years, Nvidia was somewhat successful, but was an erratic performer in a small industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Around 2004, Nvidia increased the resources it devoted to parallel processing. There was probably some foresight involved in this strategy, but for around a decade Nvidia&#8217;s results created doubts about its wisdom. The market for such GPUs was tiny. Most experts believed it was too hard to make parallel software work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But Jensen excels at solving problems that most others would reject as impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">The Most Important Decision<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Nvidia was sometimes less interested in neural networks than neural network researchers were interested in Nvidia. Geoffrey Hinton sometimes couldn&#8217;t get Nvidia to respond to his emails (circa 2009?).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 2013, Bryan Catanzaro proposed that Nvidia support work on <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1410.0759\">cuDNN<\/a> (software to run deep learning on GPUs). The reaction from Nvidia&#8217;s software team was negative. Catanzaro appealed to Jensen. Jensen quickly developed something like an expert understanding of deep learning, and soon announced that AI was a &#8220;once in a lifetime opportunity&#8221;. He made AI Nvidia&#8217;s top priority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It took a fair amount of skill to be positioned to profit from AI. But a large fraction of Nvidia&#8217;s success depended on that one decision. I estimate it was worth a trillion dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jensen ascribes Nvidia&#8217;s success to &#8220;luck, founded by vision&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Jensen&#8217;s Character<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>What drives Jensen? The book provides no clear answer. It doesn&#8217;t seem to be money. I&#8217;m guessing it&#8217;s some measure of business success along the lines of market share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are some obvious similarities to Elon Musk. A few key differences:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Loyalty: Jensen almost never fires employees.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Musk&#8217;s visions involve backchaining from fantasy; Jensen looks forward from reality.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jensen has a stable marriage; Musk has something else.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Jensen is pretty cautious about expressing political opinions[*]; Musk&#8217;s businesses have been hurt because he&#8217;s vocal about politics.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8211; Witt claims that Jensen &#8220;never offered a single political opinion&#8221;, but I found opinions on immigration policy and export restrictions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Jensen often yells at employees. But that always seems calculated to be productive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>He appears to have above average integrity. The only act described in the book that I&#8217;m inclined to classify as unethical is filing a possibly frivolous lawsuit against competitor 3dfx, at a time when the legal fees were enough to put 3dfx out of business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I should note that after the book was published, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.androidheadlines.com\/2025\/05\/from-melted-cables-to-melted-ethics-nvidia-pressures-media-to-manipulate-reviews.html\">a report was published<\/a> about Nvidia exerting questionable pressure on the news media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">AI Risks<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Another difference is that Jensen insists there are no risks from AI which are worth our attention. Witt is quite concerned (&#8220;It seemed to me that the end of my profession was approaching. It seemed to me that the end of reality was approaching. It seemed to me that the end of <em>consciousness<\/em> was approaching.&#8221;), and annoyed Jensen by pushing hard on this topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Jensen isn&#8217;t willing to say enough on this topic for us to infer much about his reasons. I&#8217;ll conjecture that he&#8217;s mostly reasoning from what&#8217;s good for his business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I expect that if a political situation causes Nvidia&#8217;s business to be impaired by alignment concerns, Jensen would devote some unusual thought to handling alignment. I wish I could tell whether that meant using his intelligence to actually solve alignment, or to convince the world not to worry about alignment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I see a ray of hope from a 2023 interview, in which he said: &#8220;No AI should be able to learn without a human in the loop.&#8221;. It won&#8217;t be long before he&#8217;ll see that this is a real issue. Maybe enforcing such a rule will be enough to keep us safe. Or maybe he&#8217;ll see that the rule can&#8217;t be enforced, and he&#8217;ll switch to advocating a more enforceable rule.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Book review: The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World&#8217;s Most Coveted Microchip, by Stephen Witt. This is a well-written book about the rise of deep learning, and the man who is the most responsible for building the hardware that it needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[26,22],"tags":[38],"class_list":["post-2056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-books","tag-risks"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-xa","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2056"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2057,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2056\/revisions\/2057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}