Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

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I mean, the last 3 paragraphs of NVidia's statement are:

> While the Board has no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised, the Board's inquiry will examine all available information.

> Jensen fully supports the review and has committed to cooperating with it.

> The Board has confidence in Jensen and his leadership team and will provide further updates as appropriate.

My interpretation of this is simply this is what you do when you are the board of a public company and the U.S. government has accused your CEO of being the target of espionage. You need to get the facts, if only to cover your own asses. If it turns out the accusations are hogwash, then you have facts of your own that you can release to counter whatever hogwash the government puts out. If it turns out your CEO committed a crime or otherwise did something improper, then you need to dismiss the CEO to prevent your complicity in the crime. If it turns out there holes in your security protocols around top executives, you need to plug those holes.

But until you have the facts, coming from an independent investigation, neither they nor us have any clue what the right response is.

> this is what you do when you are the board of a public company

No, it's not. In a majority of cases where a public-company Board independently investigates its CEO, the CEO gets removed [1]. (And they're all announced like this. If you're in that 40% where you don't remove the CEO, you don't want to have burned them.)

If the Board still unconditionally trusted Jensen, they'd have him hire outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation of NVIDIA's security apparatus.

[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/s...

40% is a pretty high percentage where they don't get removed.

There's some kind of a cognitive bias here similar to the base rate fallacy but not quite the same.

Yes, 40% is pretty high in the abstract. But a 60% chance of getting removed is insanely high compared to the base rate for this concrete case! Before this news broke, what were the odds of Huang not being a CEO of Nvidia a year from now for any reason. I'd definitely have taken the under at 1%, and the over maybe at 0.1%?

Like, what other risks were on the horizon? Him getting bored or tired? Not that man. A terminal illness that was diagnosed too late to treat? That happens very rarely for the ultra rich with their access to infinite high quality health care. A freak accident, e.g. airplane crash? Possible, but the rates are <<1%. Targeted violence? Unlikely, Nvidia is too far removed to be hated that strongly by anyone. The board firing him for some other reason? It'd have to be something that can't be papered over with hush money (e.g. any standard sex scandal almost certainly could; it's only the national security aspects that make it impossible here). A hostile takeover or similar that leads to him being ousted? Logistically and financially impossible.

Going from so rare it's not worth planning for to even odds is a pretty darn big shift from a single event!

> 40% is a pretty high percentage where they don't get removed

It's very low for a CYA exercise.

Boards don't independently investigate their CEOs as a matter of routine or to cover their asses. That's what an independent investigation by outside counsel is for. The Board taking the reins on this is absolutely substantial to anyone who understands how corporate Boards work.

We'll see.

Another way to put this is "Do you feel comfortable shorting NVDA tomorrow morning based on this news?" Because if Huang is removed it's very likely they will face challenges finding and reacting the next big use-case for GPUs, not to mention capitalizing on AI (which already is seeming shaky for other reasons). If you're completely confident that this will result in his removal, it seems like there's easy money to be made here.

Personally I don't feel comfortable enough to put my money where my mouth is. I'd give it even odds, but even odds, to me, is not enough to say it'll go one way or another.

> Because if Huang is removed it's very likely they will face challenges finding and reacting the next big use-case for GPUs

Huang has done a fine job managing NVidia, but he's also the poster child for "better lucky than good."

It's not like he led NVidia out of dire straits to pivot into the cryptocurrency/blockchain, and then AI, bubbles. They were making hardware for computer graphics, and that just so happened to be the same foundational hardware for the two biggest technology bubbles of the 21st century, twice in a row.

I find it hard to believe NVidia's incredible success can be attributed exclusively to him. Sometimes you're just in the right place at the right time.

They’ve been in the right place at the right time too many times.

It’s a bit like when you watch a fantastic FPS player play, they just always seem to be in the right place to catch the other guy off guard.

Huang didn’t know exactly what was coming - but he knew enough and managed to put NV into a position where it could quickly exploit whatever did emerge.

> twice in a row

If I ever hit a home run in baseball, it would be blind luck. If I did it twice, nah, that would be incredibly unlikely, as I have zero talent at any ball sports.

Gates, Jobs, and Musk - each had a home run 3 times. That is so unlikely to be happenstance, ya gotta admit they had talent.

I'm not a fan of Jensen by any means, but he did start the CUDA program some eight years before it was actually useful (the alexnet moment). He called the need for high performance linear algebra for scientific computing, it just took a while for it to find its first killer app.

CUDA was well-used in HPC and other compute-intensive spaces long before neural nets were in style.

If you look at the evolution of GPGPU computing, at least from an HPC perspective, CUDA is almost an obvious step. What’s perplexing is that AMD and Intel let it get so far ahead in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

CUDA was a formalization of what happened outside of NV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUDA#History

That was becoming a hot topic at the time prior to DL getting on the map but it was smart to recognize the latent demand for GPGPU. Was still going to lead to solid growth with AI was just not going to be the exponential growth we saw if it didn't happen.

Meanwhile intel (as but one prominent example) was also researching and manufacturing GPUs for most (all?) of that timeline yet somehow managed to fumble it. Quite often IMO simply not screwing up while already holding all of the necessary cards is a lot harder than it looks.

> Another way to put this is "Do you feel comfortable shorting NVDA tomorrow morning based on this news?"

This is a silly way to read corporate governance. There exist finer levers for tuning up and down exposure than going long or short.

> If you're completely confident that this will result in his removal

Straw man. Nobody argued this.

What's being argued is that the top comment's implication–that this is par for the course–is bullshit. The Board is signaling a partial loss of confidence in their CEO. There is also substantial risk, though no assurance, that Jensen will step down.

> I'd give it even odds

That's what about 50% chances mean.

A percentage is a pretty meaningless if there underlying factors that separate those who dont.

I image a large portion of those investigations start with the board or shareholders seriously displeased with the CEO and wanting to mount a case for removal.

Sure, but everything you're describing here accurately falls under the label of "investigating the CEO".

Accurate literally, but misleading to anyone who speaks English.

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