The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip

Excellent, well written and imminently topical

having not followed the story closely, this was incredibly helpful in building my knowledge of the NVDA story and the evolution of AI. it filled out the characters, what they did, the breakthroughs and thinking in real time. As an investor in the AI/tech space and NVDA in particular, i think this is required reading.

This is perhaps the most interesting book on AI, a technology that can be included in the list of very few key discoveries that changed the history of mankind. The wheel, plough, steam engine, electricity, internal combustion engine, penicillin, the world wide web, being others in this list. It is often said that discovery is not just luck, but a combination of fortunate circumstances and scientific curiosity. This book excels in telling us the story of Nvidia and its founder Jensen Huang, in an inimitable style that combines the person, the company, its culture, the technology, the ecosystem, the roller coaster business and the birth of a new system of computing, that we call AI. Jensen Huang’s personal story is touching and equally inspiring. A challenging childhood in Taiwan, he is forced to migrate to the US at the age of ten, to be brought up by his uncle, and admitted to a school meant for juvenile delinquents in Kentucky. Ridiculed, bullied and often insulted as a ‘Chink’ or Chinese, this young boy manages to emerge at the top of his class. A nationally competitive athlete with a near perfect GPA, and with outstanding merit, he is admitted to the National Honor Society, that any Ivy League college would be proud to have him in their campus. He chose Oregon State University instead, since he wanted to be close to his home. Graduating from OSU in electrical engineering, where he finds his life partner Lori Mills, Jensen starts his career at AMD. Unrelenting focus, hard work, depth of knowledge and persistence against all odds are the hallmark of this young immigrant who is destined to change the world. Jensen’s decision to focus on the market for hardware to support gaming was the momentous decision. While CPUs made by mega companies like Intel and AMD, focused on scientific applications and mathematical accuracy, gaming needed a processor meant for graphics. Essentially, graphics was the capability to handle millions of pixels, that needed brute force to handle large data, and could compromise on the accuracy of scientific calculations. The market was small, and with lower cost and thin margins, the bigger companies were simply not interested. This is exactly what Clayton Christensen describes as the ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ in his path breaking book. While incumbents focus on moving higher in the trajectory of technological performance, the disruptive technologies focus on what is just ‘good enough’, but offer a totally new dimension of value to the customers, thus catering to non consumers at the lower end of the market. Soon these technologies move up rapidly, and suddenly the big incumbents are sitting ducks. The GPU vs CPU is the most illustrative case study of this theory in recent times. In addition to the business challenges faced by Nvidia (NV: New Venture, ‘invidia’ for envy in Latin, and hence Nvidia), the book outlines the technological journey, a fusion of brilliant minds, dedication and unparalleled commitment to the task on hand. A combination of grit, intellectual stamina and uniting minds across various top universities and great companies like Google, Microsoft, AMD, Silicon Graphics to name a few, the story also has its fair share of a box office thriller, with nail biting chapters. Hitting the ceiling, shouting matches and banging doors are a part of the daily drama, well narrated. Genius and eccentricity as they say, often go together. At Nvidia, genius is in abundant measure, attracted by the opportunity of working in a cutting-edge technology, with the freedom to experiment, fail and to experiment again. In every chapter there is a thread of technology that is demystified and explained well to a common reader. The book explains the birth of Parallel Computing, Matrix multiplication and Neural Networks that is at the core of AI, which is enabled by software running on Nvidia’s GPUs. This book is bound to inspire young minds and I recommend this for students and professionals alike. As Huang once said in a cryptic acronym, ‘O.I.A.L.O’ in perfect lettering, that stood for Once In a Lifetime Opportunity’. The twenty-first century will be powered by AI, and shaped by those who understand this OIALO. Market valuation of Nvidia, despite reaching astronomical numbers appears to be just a by-product. It pales in comparison to what lies ahead for AI and its transformative capabilities. The Luddites may not agree and not surprisingly so. But for Nvidia, this is just the beginning. I rate this amongst the best business books of this decade. Thanks a ton to Stephen Witt.

In “The Thinking Machine” Stephen Witt writes about Nvidia’s early years designing graphics processing units (GPUs) for video games then progressing to the AI age. After Open AI released ChatGPT in 2022 Nvidia chips were suddenly on everybody’s mind and the stock soared. Not all of Nvidia’s products were successful but through pure effort and trial and error the company came to dominate the market, surpassing Intel and AMD. Witt does a brisk job taking the reader behind the scenes with Nvidia engineers and those close to Jensen Huang to paint a picture of the hard-charging founder while asking whether AI is truly beneficial to humankind.

Very good book!