The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Jensen Huang is a remarkable man. He is no doubt a very capable engineer, but his success has come more from his competitive drive and uncompromising work ethic. He both inspires and intimidates his followers. In that sense he is much like Steve Jobs, but Huang is smarter technically and shrewder in a business sense. He was always a big advocate of parallel computing. The current success of Nvidia, though, is partly luck. It began primarily as a graphics video card manufacturer relying mostly on PC gamers. It struggled along with that small consumer customer base until the killer app – AI – came along and found that the graphics cards were ideally suited for it. Huang was slow to see the match for what it was and much of the company’s success was due to the skill of some very smart people who were recruited by Huang for their brilliance and loyalty to parallel computing. They in turn were drawn to Nvidia because of Huang’s reputation as a parallel computing pioneer and because he had the hardware and openness to try new things. Nvidia is now the world’s most valuable company.
The book tells this story and tries to give the reader a sense of the technology, but is really a biography. There is a brief thumbnail description of a neural net and parallel computing, but barely mentions other aspects of artificial intelligence like Large Language Models (LLM), deep learning, or random forest computing. If you read this hoping to gain an understanding of how AI works, you will be disappointed. It seems many, maybe all, scientists and AI programmers don’t really understand how it works. The writing is professional, reportorial in style, but becomes rather repetitive largely because so many stories of the people who are drawn to Nvidia are so similar. If nothing else, I gained an appreciation for how complex and specialized the technology is and I learned that the huge energy draw AI causes is for the training, not as much its subsequent use. It’s not a page turner, but I enjoyed the book.
