alt Hacker NewsIt's not immediately clear that Jensen is as visionary and indispensable as some people claim. True, under his watch, Nvidia rose from a relatively obscure company to one of the largest companies in the world, and even a national asset. But it's really hard to believe that these achievements are due to Jensen's brilliance. Jensen didn't create the crypto mania that propelled Nvidia in the 2010s, nor did he create the current AI revolution.
To me, he had the good fortune of standing in the right place at the right time. He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution. This is not to deny his brilliance and business acumen, but I think too many people overstate his contribution to both the company and the United States. Of course I could be wrong so I welcome correction or alternative viewpoints.
Speaking of the US, Jensen has indeed become a liability. A compromised CEO is, of course, a liability to a national asset, and a politically toxic one at that. Nvidia is a business with sensitive political ties now. It can't afford to appear compromised in the eyes of Washington. Therefore, Nvidia's stakeholders must let Jensen go; otherwise, it will affect the company as a whole.
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I don't know much about Nvidia's history, but isn't Jensen largely responsible for CUDA and the company's monopoly on machine learning hardware? It wasn't an obvious bet at the time that this would pay off, but Nvidia sure poured a lot of money into making their software stack so good that nobody wanted to even consider other options.
You are really not giving the man any credit - I suspect you weren't part of the GPU era of video games and don't understand the roots of nvidia. That man hustled that company. You can't say things like "right time and right place" without being a little blase.
Yes, you're entirely correct. But you're also underestimating the people's potential to squander great opportunities like these. Look at AMD for example, they had a good head start over nvidia yet they haven't done anything remotely as good.
> He is no Steve Jobs, who almost single-handedly started the PC revolution and the iPhone revolution
by being ousted from his own company and using his golden parachute while * being bought back*?
Under his watch? You mean the entire time from the very beginning. He built the company from nothing and you are not sure he is visionary and indispensable. can't make this shit up :)
Jensen made basically two visionary choices. The first was to promote GPGPU with CUDA across their entire lineup including consumer hardware. The second was to specifically invest heavily in supporting machine learning way before anyone else in chips cared. CuDNN came out in 2014, just two years after AlexNet. Three years before the transformer. Eight years before ChatGPT. Before PyTorch. Before TensorFlow. Other chip CEOs probably hadn't even heard of AlexNet in 2014.
Assuming these decisions are attributable to him personally, then he absolutely deserves the description "visionary". That said, he's made plenty of other choices I don't like, and also invested in plenty of silly stuff that isn't panning out for them. I don't really think Nvidia needs a visionary right now. They have the best business in the world and they just need to execute. Regardless of whether he deserves to be ousted, the company will be fine without him for the next decade at least.