Pun Salad

I put this book by Stephen Witt on my get-at-library list after reading the WSJ review last year. (WSJ gifted link). I seem to be doing that a lot lately. I was somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the book. Witt has a real knack for combining personal anecdotes, pungent observations, and layman-level technical detail into an interesting whole.

Part of the book is a biography of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. I think it's fair to say that he's flown under the radar for most of his career. There are businessfolk who can't/couldn't seem to stay out of the headlines: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, … But (shame on me, perhaps) I couldn't have told you who helmed Nvidia before reading this book. And, guess what, Jensen Huang might go down in history as having a bigger impact on the 21st century than any of those guys.

If you believe some of the AI pessimists, though, Huang might be known as "the guy who caused mankind's doom." (Except, small detail, there might be nobody left to make that claim.)

Huang's biography takes up the early part of the book. His unlikely origin story: born in Taiwan, raised in Thailand, sent by his parents (at age 10) to a dinky Baptist-run school in rural Kentucky. But (eventually) rejoined his parents in Oregon, worked at Denny's, became an expert ping-pong player, attended Oregon State, got a job at AMD in semiconductor design, and eventually…

He still likes to go to Denny's for a big breakfast. And, according to Witt, who tagged along one morning, he left a $1000 tip for the waitress. I don't think it's revealed whether that's his usual behavior.

What is, apparently Huang's usual behavior: angrily dressing down his employees in front of their co-workers. You wouldn't think that would be a successful business strategy, but it worked for Nvidia. Huang almost never fired those targets of his wrath. And they seemed to remain fiercely loyal toward the company and Huang himself.

It doesn't hurt, I suppose, that he made them all pretty rich along the way.

The book is also a biography of Nvidia; it is perhaps unappreciated how many near-death experiences the company had on its way to its current dizzying success. (As I type: a $4.58 trillion market cap, stock price up 1160% over the past five years.) But before that, they had their share of dud products, false starts, takeover attempts, etc.

The company in its early days was aimed at gamers who lusted after ever-higher performance video. But some curious coders noted that the Nvidia hardware could also do arithmetic incredibly quickly. Which allowed scientists to "smuggle demanding mathematical payloads—say, simulating the formation of a galaxy, or modeling the ignition process of a nuclear bomb—into hardware meant to render carjackings and disembowelments." (One of Witt's "pungent observations" I mentioned above.)

The third part of the book is a layperson's history of AI, a field full of hype, broken promises, and dead-end research. Huang's, and Nvidia's, success was in resurrecting and combining two scorned, out-of-fashion subfields: one in AI (neural networks), the other in computer architecture (parallel processing). This (eventually) turned out to work surprisingly well for the company, to put it mildly.

The penultimate chapter in the book is a look at the possibility that AI will kill us all. In the cheerful language of the theorists: p(doom), the probability of doom. I've always been an optimist about that, thinking that capitalist innovation and technical progress has always been an easy net win for mankind in the past. But it's hard to deny that a lot of smart people think differently.

Huang is not one of those people. In the book's final chapter, Witt describes his final interview with Huang, where he tries to elicit commentary about those dire predictions. This does not work out well: Witt finds himself at the receiving end of one of Huang's harangues. Witt is hurt and somewhat surprised, and has deep thoughts; it's almost as if Huang doesn't want to think about possible downsides.

So: we find ourselves fulfilling that (fake) Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times." Thanks to Huang (and others).