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> It’s questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market vs he just positioned the company to eat up sales to high energy particle physics & simil

by paulmd 2y ago

> It’s questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market vs he just positioned the company to eat up sales to high energy particle physics & similar super-computer applications and then got lucky it's actually specifically not questionable because it's been covered by journalists etc. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-huangs-nvidia-is-powering-the-ai-revolution https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/12/04/how-jensen-hua... > Within a couple of years, every entrant in the ImageNet competition was using a neural network. By the mid-twenty-tens, neural networks trained on G.P.U.s were identifying images with ninety-six-per-cent accuracy, surpassing humans. Huang’s ten-year crusade to democratize supercomputing had succeeded. “The fact that they can solve computer vision, which is completely unstructured, leads to the question ‘What else can you teach it?’ ” Huang said to me. > The answer seemed to be: everything. Huang concluded that neural networks would revolutionize society, and that he could use CUDA to corner the market on the necessary hardware. He announced that he was once again betting the company. “He sent out an e-mail on Friday evening saying everything is going to deep learning, and that we were no longer a graphics company,” Greg Estes, a vice-president at Nvidia, told me. “By Monday morning, we were an A.I. company. Literally, it was that fast.” > Around the time Huang sent the e-mail, he approached Catanzaro, Nvidia’s leading A.I. researcher, with a thought experiment. “He told me to imagine he’d marched all eight thousand of Nvidia’s employees into the parking lot,” Catanzaro said. “Then he told me I was free to select anyone from the parking lot to join my team.”

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vlovich123 2y ago
I mean your article literally suggests that CUDA was a misstep. It failed to bring supercomputing to the masses until they got bailed out by AI coinciding with needing supercomputer powers. > In marketing cuda, Nvidia had sought a range of customers, including stock traders, oil prospectors, and molecular biologists. At one point, the company signed a deal with General Mills to simulate the thermal physics of cooking frozen pizza. One application that Nvidia spent little time thinking about was artificial intelligence. There didn’t seem to be much of a market. > Despite the snub, Hinton encouraged his students to use cuda, including a Ukrainian-born protégé of his named Alex Krizhevsky, who Hinton thought was perhaps the finest programmer he’d ever met. In 2012, Krizhevsky and his research partner, Ilya Sutskever, working on a tight budget, bought two GeForce cards from Amazon. Krizhevsky then began training a visual-recognition neural network on Nvidia’s parallel-computing platform, feeding it millions of images in a single week. “He had the two G.P.U. boards whirring in his bedroom,” Hinton said. “Actually, it was his parents who paid for the quite considerable electricity costs.” Basically Hinton thought CUDA was a better platform and kept encouraging his acolytes to utilize it with NVidia completely ignoring it. For what it’s worth ChatGPT and LLMs are not the start of the story. I remember seeing Hinton present his research in 2009 and thought it was a revolutionary step forward. It took a much longer amount of time for NVidia to notice that they should be marketing CUDA to AI. They did so around the same time that Google started building their own inference accelerators for Tensorflow. So at that point NVidia was getting multiple signals already from a big customer that there’s something here.
- paulmd 2y ago
  You seem to be tangentially attempting to refute a claim I didn't make / responding to a comment I didn't make? Are you lost? Yes, it's probably true that in 2009 or whatever it wasn't on NVIDIA's radar as being a major R&D priority. It was by 2014-2015, which is what I cited. You claimed it couldn't be proven that Jensen specifically targeted AI as a priority, and it's clear that by 2015 or so he was, at a time when AMD was not even taking GPGPU itself seriously as a development priority let alone focusing on a specific niche or field like AI. > It's questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market ... again: no, it is not, literally he's been focused on this specific market for a decade and we have the receipts. if your point is that he didn't see it fifteen years ago instead of ten years ago... ok I guess you win then, discussion concluded.

by paulmd 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

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vlovich123 2y ago

I mean your article literally suggests that CUDA was a misstep. It failed to bring supercomputing to the masses until they got bailed out by AI coinciding with needing supercomputer powers. > In marketing cuda, Nvidia had sought a range of customers, including stock traders, oil prospectors, and molecular biologists. At one point, the company signed a deal with General Mills to simulate the thermal physics of cooking frozen pizza. One application that Nvidia spent little time thinking about was artificial intelligence. There didn’t seem to be much of a market. > Despite the snub, Hinton encouraged his students to use cuda, including a Ukrainian-born protégé of his named Alex Krizhevsky, who Hinton thought was perhaps the finest programmer he’d ever met. In 2012, Krizhevsky and his research partner, Ilya Sutskever, working on a tight budget, bought two GeForce cards from Amazon. Krizhevsky then began training a visual-recognition neural network on Nvidia’s parallel-computing platform, feeding it millions of images in a single week. “He had the two G.P.U. boards whirring in his bedroom,” Hinton said. “Actually, it was his parents who paid for the quite considerable electricity costs.” Basically Hinton thought CUDA was a better platform and kept encouraging his acolytes to utilize it with NVidia completely ignoring it. For what it’s worth ChatGPT and LLMs are not the start of the story. I remember seeing Hinton present his research in 2009 and thought it was a revolutionary step forward. It took a much longer amount of time for NVidia to notice that they should be marketing CUDA to AI. They did so around the same time that Google started building their own inference accelerators for Tensorflow. So at that point NVidia was getting multiple signals already from a big customer that there’s something here.

paulmd 2y ago
You seem to be tangentially attempting to refute a claim I didn't make / responding to a comment I didn't make? Are you lost? Yes, it's probably true that in 2009 or whatever it wasn't on NVIDIA's radar as being a major R&D priority. It was by 2014-2015, which is what I cited. You claimed it couldn't be proven that Jensen specifically targeted AI as a priority, and it's clear that by 2015 or so he was, at a time when AMD was not even taking GPGPU itself seriously as a development priority let alone focusing on a specific niche or field like AI. > It's questionable whether or not he anticipated this specific market ... again: no, it is not, literally he's been focused on this specific market for a decade and we have the receipts. if your point is that he didn't see it fifteen years ago instead of ten years ago... ok I guess you win then, discussion concluded.