During Nvidia's Formative Years, Its CEO Reckons It 'had A Mission...

It's easy to be whimsical about nearly ruining the company when it's now worth trillions.

It's been over 32 years since Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem started a new company together. It even took them a while to come up with a name, but they eventually settled on Nvidia. Yes, that little, independent, underdog company. The one worth $5 trillion back in October. That level of fortune gives one plenty of opportunities to spend hours reminiscing about the past, present, and future, which is precisely what Jensen Huang and Joe Rogan recently did.

Specifically, for almost two and a half hours, Huang chatted on the Joe Rogan Experience about all things AI, GPU, CUDA, consciousness, and what have you. There's an awful lot to delve into, but I was particularly drawn to the section where Rogan remarks on Nvidia's massive AI growth and capabilities: "How funny would it be that it [AI] is birthed out of the desire for computer graphics for video games? It's kind of crazy when you think about it that way."

This prompted Jensen to start going over Nvidia's beginning, when it was a tiny group of engineers in 1993: "We were trying to create this new computing approach. The question is, what's the killer app? We wanted to create a new type of computing architecture, a new type of computer that can solve problems that normal computers can't solve."

A noble goal, one might say. However, Huang hits the issue with this idea right on the head. "Well, the applications that existed in the industry in 1993 are applications that normal computers can solve, because if the normal computers can't solve them, why would the application exist?

"And so we had a mission statement for a company that has no chance of success, but I didn't know that in 1993; it just sounded like a good idea, right?"

If you're not familiar with Nvidia's early history, the application it eventually settled upon was 3D graphics rendering. More importantly, the kind of rendering that Sega was doing with its arcade units, e.g. Virtua Fighter. I thoroughly recommend that you grab a copy of The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the making of a tech giant, by Tae Kim, as it's richly detailed and goes into great depth about how Nvidia did more than just gain inspiration from Sega.

Here's a key snippet: "Amid the business of the trade show, the Nvidia team managed to secure an introduction to representatives from the Japanese video-game and console maker Sega. Impressed with the NV1 demonstration,

Source: PC Gamer