The Computing Platform Underlying AI, with Jensen Huang, Founder & CEO of NVIDIA

**Jensen Huang** (0:05)
Computer programming has now been completely disrupted. That for the very first time in the history of computing, the language of programming a computer is human.
Any human language, it doesn't have to be grammatically correct. And it's fairly incredible that anyone can program a computer now. That's a big deal.

**Sarah Guo** (0:30)
This is the No Priors Podcast. I'm Sarah Guo.

**Elad Gil** (0:33)
I'm Elad Gil.

**Sarah Guo** (0:34)
We invest in, advise, and help start technology companies.

**Elad Gil** (0:37)
In this podcast, we're talking with the leading founders and researchers in AI about the biggest questions.

**Sarah Guo** (0:49)
So much of the conversation in AI today is about new models and new applications, but it's all built on the back of Nvidia and specifically Nvidia GPUs.
The Nvidia A100 has been called the workhorse of today's AI ecosystem. And this week on No Priors, we're so excited to have Jensen Huang, the founder, president, and CEO of Nvidia. So over the last 30 years, he's created a company that began with a goal to accelerate graphics and has transformed the way we compute to become a $674 billion behemoth, as far as I could tell this morning, but that the CEO describes as a company that he's always trying to save. Thank you for doing this with us, Jensen.

**Jensen Huang** (1:25)
Delighted to do it, Sarah.

**Sarah Guo** (1:26)
Why don't we start at the beginning? You worked at LSI and AMD before starting a company. How did that happen?

**Jensen Huang** (1:32)
They gave me a job.
Let's see. I was at Oregon State University, and it was a campus company day, and I interviewed at a lot of companies, and two companies really connected with me. I love designing chips and designing computers, and at the time in our lab, in the computer science lab, there was a poster of 29,032-bit CPU from AMD, and I always thought it'd be cool to build that.
On the other hand, there was another company that was a startup at the time, built by one of the legends of Silicon Valley, Wolf Corrigan, and they started a company to design chips using software, to design chips not by hand but by using programmable logic, and you would describe it in language and it would synthesize it to chips. Of course, I chose to go to AMD. It turned out that I went there to design microprocessors, and my office mate ended up going to LSI, and she insisted I go there after I was there. After she went there, and the LSI team said, hey, we were recruiting this kid from Oregon State, and we really wanted him to come work at LSI Logic, and it turned out to have been her office mate. So they all reached out to me, and I decided to go there because it was at the beginning of the EDA industry, it was at the beginning of designing chips using computers, and it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was in the beginning of the ability for every company to build their own chips, and it's the reason why I met some really great computer architects. Andy Bechtolsheim was the founder of Sun, I got to work with a bunch of great architects at Silicon Graphics, and John Rubinstein, who was at a company called Dana Computer, who became the Vice President of Engineering for Apple, and then of course, the two founders of Nvidia, Chris Malkowski and Curtis Paine myself. And so I got a chance to work with some really amazing computer architects, and I learned a lot about building computers with chips, and so that's my early days.

**Sarah Guo** (3:36)
And you were a star at LSI with your co-founders. At what point did you know, I have to start a company?

**Jensen Huang** (3:43)
It wasn't my idea, it was theirs. Chris and Curtis wanted to leave Sun. They had their own reasons, and I was doing really well at LSI Logic, and I enjoyed my job, and we had two kids, Laurie and I, and just like you, they wouldn't stop hounding me. And they said, hey, we want to start this company, and we really need you to come along. And I told them that I really needed to have a job, and they need to figure out what to do. At the time, the Valley was, the way of designing computers was rather split between general-purpose computing versus using accelerators. And about 99% of the Valley was believed in general-purpose computing, and about 1% believed in acceleration. For 25 years, 99% was right.
We decided to start a company on accelerated computing.