All the recent breakthroughs in “machine learning” and “artificial intelligence”—from goofy chatbots to revolutionary medical tools—have relied on the computing power supplied by a single American company. The Santa Clara tech firm Nvidia makes microchips that can handle the sheer volume of data required for training A.I. models to imitate patterns in human speech and images. That one product has made Nvidia the most valuable company on earth. Its CEO, Jensen Huang, is one of the most important men in tech. He is also one of the most fascinating.
Two recent books illuminate the significance of Huang’s work: Tae Kim’s The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant and Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. Kim, a senior writer at Barron’s who has covered the tech sector for decades, draws a portrait of Huang as a maverick CEO by outlining the suite of habits, strategies, and sayings that have fostered Nvidia’s success. Witt, whose book emerged from a New Yorker profile, provides a more holistic account of Huang’s biography and its relationship to his company. Taken together, the two books reveal a great deal about the hopes and fears surrounding the A.I. boom. They also serve as a tribute to the sheer force of personality that characterizes American titans of industry like Huang.
A microchip is a tiny set of electronic circuits carved into silicon. Silicon is a “semiconductor,” meaning that the flow of electricity through it can be modulated with extreme precision. You can fit billions of electric components onto a microchip the size of a fingernail, and so you can encode a vast amount of information onto a very small space by representing it in patterns of electric stimulus. Carved onto the square face of every chip runs a latticework of circuits that convert electricity into problem-solving power. The chips Nvidia pioneered—Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs—have the unique ability to perform the kinds of tasks required for A.I.
