From Jensen Huang: NVIDIA - The $4 Trillion Company & the AI Revolution | Lex Fridman Podcast #494:
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And developers don’t come to a computing platform just because, you know, it could perform something interesting. They come to a computing platform because the
install base is large. Because a developer, like anybody else, wants to develop software that reaches a lot of people. So, the install base is, in fact, the single most important part of an architecture. The architecture could attract enormous amounts of criticism.
Jensen Huang on “worse is better.”
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we could put a supercomputer in the hands of every researcher in school, every scientist, you know, every engineering school, every… or every student in school, and eventually something amazing will happen.
Well, the problem was CUDA increased our cost of that GPU, which is a consumer product, so tremendously, it completely consumed all of the company’s gross profit dollars.
Talk about a big bet. NVIDIA focused on enabling scientists and education was sowing the seeds that might now ever flower.
He later said CUDA support added 50% additional cost to each GPU, but their gross margin was only 30%.
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The CEOs are probably not paying any attention to the contracts that are being signed, … As a result, the CSPs then have to go down to the utilities, and they expect the nine, the six nines. … Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade. And so, if the power, if the utility, if the grid tells us, “Listen, we’re gonna have to back you down to about 80%,” we’re gonna say, “That’s no problem at all.”
Germany already does this due to their significant use of non-baseload power like wind. The technology exists and has been demonstrated. But it’s unclear if Germany would ever be a pioneer in maximizing efficiency of AI datacenters since EU is moving so cautiously in other aspects of AI regulation.
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I look for where, where, um my next, next bucket of opportunities are first. Meanwhile, I’m cultivating space.
Space is not the next bucket of opportunity. It is a bucket of opportunity. So he’s cultivating it.
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there’s a incredible superpower of being, being have a, the mind of a child.
You know? And I say to myself oftentimes when I look at something, and almost, almost everything, my first thought is, “How hard can it be?”
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Um, surprisingly, no. And I would, I would actually go the other way. Because I do so much of my work publicly, when I’m wrong, pretty much everybody sees it.
In response to Lex asking “do you feel the effect of money and power and fame in making it harder for you to sort of be wrong in your own head?”
Jensen gave this a serious thought before he answered. I am impressed.
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I think it’s now. I think we’ve achieved AGI. - Do you think you could have a company run by an AI system like this? - Possible, and the reason for that is this. You said a billion, and you didn’t say forever. And so, for example, uh… It is not out of the question that Claw was able to create a web service, some interesting little app that all of a sudden, you know, a few billion people used for 50 cents, and then it went out of business again shortly after. Now, we saw a whole bunch of those types of companies during the Internet era, and most of those websites were not anything more sophisticated than what OpenClaw could generate today.
In response to the question of when we’ll reach AGI, where AGI is defined as an AI that can make a billion-dollar company. Smart answer.
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And so the prediction was radiologists would go away because studying radiology scans was a thing of the past. AI will do that. Well, they were absolutely right.
Computer vision is completely superhuman. Every radiology platform and package today is driven by AI, and yet the number of radiologists grew.
Classic Jevon’s Paradox. Jensen went on to say
- Alarmism scared people away from pursuing radiology
- AI allowed us to make more productive use of radiology scans, so we do more of it now.
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Do you think the number of programmers in the world might increase, not decrease? - Yes. And the reason for that is this. What is the definition of coding? I believe it is… The definition of coding, as of today, is simply specifying, specification, and maybe if you want to be rather directive, you could even give it an architecture of the software that you wanted to write. So the question is, how many people could do that?
He’s correct. Actually hammering out syntax is not the productive part of coding.