Link to the interview https://youtu.be/Hrbq66XqtCo?t=3457
Watched the interview and as far as I see he was getting 'heated' because he was speaking the obvious truth and being frustrated by poorly informed questions.
This is entirely expected from somebody like him who has a long history of being on the right side of technical argument.
He is a huge loss to Nvidia and the US - replaced by a ex-CFO.
I don't see it. Nvidia has a lot to answer for, and the fact that Jensen was very successful as a CEO does not shy away from the cracks in the structure.
It was illegal, and I'm sure if this comes to light there will be (major) repercussions, but I don't see it as an immoral move.
Cheating on your wife of 40 years OTOH...
But how do we know he wasn’t being whispered to by the smoking baddie he was trying to impress? Maybe he’d not have taken the risk were he not having this affair but we know what men do when their ego is on the line. Case in point: Musk paying people to play PoE for him and losing his shit when he was caught.
Do I think money is a good enough explanation? Yes. Could I believe that what’s in his pants also played a part? Also yes.
If the sanctions are to prevent buying the products of slavery, that's a moral issue, and violating the sactions is also a moral issue.
Same deal if the sanctions are to prevent selling things that will be used to carry out genocide/etc. That's a moral issue, so violating the sanctions is a moral issue.
I don't think there's an alegation that the GPUs will be used for immoral purposes, just that the US government has national security concerns. Those concerns may or may not be valid, and may or may not be served by having trade sanctions applied effectively, but I don't think that's a question of morality.
It's not de facto immoral to violate the law. It could be immoral to violate the law and conceal it.
But then it would be the thing that is sanctioned that is the immoral activity, not the breaking of a sanction, right?
It's like you said, unlawful != immoral.
It's arguable either way, morality isn't a formal logic. There's no right answer, and it's mostly judged by popular consensus... If there is a final authority, they don't publish their notes. :p
Unless you're saying that disloyalty and betrayal are not issues of morality.
It's very interesting to read here that Jensen is immoral for betraying his wife but not for betraying his country.
IMO it's not a terribly strong case to make while Boeing sells whole jetliners to China, but the law was put in place for both moral and practical reasons.
In this case, though, I think Huang just believed these sanctions were the wrong move, and would end up long-term helping China and hurting the US. Which is fair to believe, but believing a law is counterproductive doesn't give you immunity if you break it.
This is a significant philosophical point.
The thing about that Lord Moulton said is that there are a bunch of things that are wrong that are not illegal, and we have to do that because people have to be capable of self-control. Patrick Deneen, in . . . The Failure of Liberalism said that he thinks liberalism is failing because it has come to the view that anything that is not illegal is moral.
What if he "believed fidelity was the wrong move" and that he'd end up divorced eventually anyways?
When is disloyalty and dishonesty immoral?
The relationship with his wife is neither here nor there, unless she wants to make it public. If she feels betrayed, wants a quick buck, or otherwise wants to for any reason, she will sue for divorce and, considering the publicity of the cases, she should get a favourable judgement.
It’s easy to impose our morals on others. But more than half of republicans believe that gay sex is immoral just as strongly as you believe that adultery is.
I'm trying to point out the inconsistecy with the OP who implied sanctions evasion is not implicitly immoral but that "cheating" is.
Huang may have had an agreement with his wife that this was fine.
But he did not have an agreement with the justice department to flaunt the law and funnel GPUs to China.
Neither did conscientious objectors? I don't think you mean to claim that the justice department is the final word on morality? Just that on this topic, you agree with the justice department (which is fine), but they will do things that you disagree with. They are no final arbiter and have helped enforce plenty of immoral laws in the past.
There is even a case to be made that flooding the Chinese market with advanced GPU's will hamstring China's ability to build their own, just like they have done to our ability to manufacture. In fact that is exactly the case Jensen has made plenty of times. By holding back exports you are actually creating the market conditions in China for building advanced GPU's indigenously, CCP doesn't even have to do much, the market is responding. Who's immoral and unpatriotic then?
But for more everyone else reading, not helping the enemy build better defenses is basically Sun Tzu 101. China keeps us addicted to their manufacturers, the least we could've done is kept them addicted to our GPU's (to be easily turned off during a time of war). But Mr.Moral Police can't look past one chess move, so we're screwed now.
To be clear, I'm not saying mine is the only moral move (like others), I'm saying being confident about the morality here is senseless.
They had an idea which they thought will be valuable. And they worked bery hard on making that idea a reality.
People complain that companies don’t have leadership with long term vision. The leadership of NVIDIA heard the idea of GGPU computation and put the resources behind the idea to make it a practical reality. Here the gap between “nerdy idea” to “product sells like hot-cakes”, is measured in decades. That is not just luck.
They absolutely got incredibly lucky.
Also, your comment has a hefty dose of survivorship bias. Lots of companies have long term visions they think will be valuable, and work very hard towards making them a reality. Few succeed. You're counting the survivors, not the attempts.
Furthermore, you fail to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different.
Jensen Huang cheated on his wife AND conspired to evade arms control regulations, but he's still a genius.
The NVIDIAs of the world are vastly outnumbered by corporations who made a long term bet that failed, but because you're counting the successes, not the attempts, you see vastly inflated outcomes. Count the attempts to make these long shots, and Huang appears very lucky indeed. Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs.
To prove Huang is a genius, you'd have to demonstrate that a different CEO of NVIDIA would have done something different.
> Crystal ball? Hardly! He couldn't forsee the outcome of 3 (is it still 3, or has the body count grown) affairs.
Fortunately, I'm not claiming that Huang is a genius at getting away with affairs. I'm claiming that if any CEO can be called a genius at running their business, Huang can.
Your best claim is that Nvidia is the biggest company in the world; therefore Huang is a genius. Maybe; some days Apple is also in the running for biggest company in the world. By your metric Tim Cook is therefore a genius. This makes me seriously doubt your metric.
You can doubt my metric, but it is quite difficult to grow a company to a trillion dollars while staying in charge the whole time.
This is a $4T company for Pete's sake!
Since NVDA had such a flat corporate structure with Huang having ~60 direct reports, I expect that the company will be lost for a period of time as they try to get their bearings. This is an opportunity for AMD, INTC and others.
This is a $5T (well, I guess $4T now) company we are talking about. What is the board being paid for?
Ma Bell without the anti-trust (yet!).
For Nvidia's sake let's hope so - but I suspect the problem is that anybody who knows their stuff will have the same opinions that got Jensen fired.
> Maybe the AI focus wasn’t all Jensens idea even
The source of the idea isn't important - Jobs famously 'borrowed' some of the best ideas from outside the company. The key skill is to be able to tell between the good and bad ideas and make the right strategic choices.
Let's be clear, she is just the interim CEO (primarily because Huang neglected to ever even start a transition plan) while NVidia searches for a permanent CEO. The names I've seen floated are Rene Haas, CEO of ARM, and Ian Buck, the creator of CUDA.
Let's expect better of leadership than to be criminal.
Jensen has two core points:
- stopping selling NVidia chips to China isn't going to stop China developing AI
- stopping NVidia selling to China will ultimately ceed US leadership in chips as Nvidia's commercial edge is as much about the dominant developer ecosystem as it is the chips per se.
ie the real risk is the default world tech stack shifts to open models on Chinese chips. End result Chinese lead in both.
He has spent his entire career competing and winning and he is being told he has to stop competing in order to achieve a goal that he knows won't actually be achieved by sacrificing NVidia.
In that scenario, where somebody is suggesting you throw away your life's work for nothing - I think anybody would be animated.
As someone who isn't based in the US/EU and whose job is to deploy LLMs on premises, I can't wait for the moment when China starts selling its GPUs globally en masse with a proper CUDA equivalent. It's going to be cheaper in the long term and without all the export control drama.
Having compute is no moat. You can always just build more.
Nvidia thrived because it paired great hardware with great software.
AMD and Intel think hardware is enough; it’s not. There’s a reason neither has ever been able to compete with Nvidia.
They have a giant ego, but I’d argue it’s probably well deserved.
Apple is/was similar. They also see that hardware without great software is useless. Spend as much; if not more on software to make your hardware shine.
Another thing is wrong was thinking that Apple should run in and build some type of AI model that’s proving to be well wrong the only thing in Apple’s way right now is memory. certainly isn’t money, and they certainly have the talent and house to fix the memory problem. The question is whether or not they have the will to do so.
No one equals Apple at this point in time when it comes to seamlessly integrating multiple devices in a useful way. Be it a desktop computer, laptop a smartphone, tablet, smartwatch, Apple Vision, AirPods with each iteration, once again in comparison to their competition, they seem to have the best hand at this time.
Memory cost is the biggest problem Apple has right now and it’s not like they don’t lack the money and with the Apple Silicon design group they certainly have the capability to fix it, or I should say design around it.
Yes, it might take 2 to 5 years to do it, but it’s not impossible, the main question is, do they have the will? And they’ve certainly shown it when it comes to processors, GPUs, modems, and other support chips that they can execute over time.
They may not execute on what you want or what I want, but in comparison to their competition, who is out there right now that can combine both the software and the hardware at a high level across the board?
So did they round something you wanted to see square, or vice versa?
You need to review Hacker News site guidelines and refrain from posting flamebait.
Look at optane; amazing hardware but total flop.
Nvidia made their market, they had these GPUs which were great at linear algebra so they found new systems to drive more demand for more powerful chips, things like PhysX, CUDA, DLSS, AI inference, etc.
They induce demand where others chased it.
Doesn’t excuse his faults but you can’t ignore what the company did.
You can say it was luck but it was definitely not "average".
Yeah, it pretty much does. CUDA is why they are positioned where they are. Other players like AMD and Intel could have done that, but they didn't, and if they had, they wouldn't have persevered for 10+ years with essentially nothing to show for it.
Whether CUDA will continue to maintain dominance is less clear. It may become a literal victim of its own success, as CUDA-based models gain the ability to migrate themselves to new platforms.
He may not have 'invented' CUDA but he saw the potential and gave it resources to be created and continually developed.
How many "CUDA-like" ideas have be squashed at other companies by leaders that don't see the potential or are willing to take a multi-year loss?
IMO, it's like SpaceX vs other rocket companies - especially Blue Origin.
Bezos, at least at first, had just as much money if not more than Musk. So why did SpaceX do so much better than them and every other rocket company. I despise Musk personally, and he's generally not as smart as he makes himself out to be - but there is something there he does differently than others in his position, some with similar resources as he does as well.
Western companies have had that problem. when the visionary CEO bites the dust. I think the Eastern companies are even more susceptible.
Note: Nvidia is the very definition of a one trick company I think they were in trouble long-term no operating system, Microsoft is in trouble in the other direction. No real in-house hardware ability. Long-term you have to have the ability of both in-house to adjust and iterate over the long haul with the changing conditions in tech.
You can criticize his recent question actions all you want, but you can’t believe he is “average”.
Due to sanctions there’s one Chinese company that seems to have become a multi-dimensional company we won’t know for sure for another two years.
Being a vertical computer company appears to be coming back in style bring on the 1980s. early 1990s.
Nvidia is a highly technical company we’re gonna find out how important Jensen really was to that company tech wise?
And if you look closely at their company, what have they really innovated on over the last five or six years? from a distance, like Intel, it seems like they just turn up the juice/Wattage in short, they are just cruising along.
It clearly didn't - don't you remember the Deepseek launch where it came as a rude shock that the much vaunted concept of a compute capacity moat was blown away?
He kept repeating that while he made the best chips, computer science was more important.
Like what? Do you think Jensen knows about some state secrets?
To me it looks like the whole thing was merely about circumventing export controls on graphic cards to sell them for $$$?
It's a good time to be heated and remind the other side they're acting childish.
Unless it's like super far in, if this counts as heated then I just don't know what you expect.