No one can predict how the world will use or value your products and services.
A trivial accident changed Nvidia’s future dramatically, its market cap increased 1000x to $1.3 Trillion in 10 years. How? Life lessons for you.
“Every Trillion$ business starts in a $0 billion addressable market” – Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang, Chris Malachoswsky, and Curtis Priem cofounded Nvidia (“envy” in Latin) to build graphics microchips for video games in 1993. The total addressable market was $0 billion. PCs were rare, only nerds and teenagers played video games.
Microsoft released Windows 95 which revolutionized the PC market and Nvidia Graphics card was not compatible.
Jensen opened staff presentations with the words “Our company is thirty days from going out of business.” Nvidia had to lay off 50% of the workforce and bet the remaining funds on the production of untested Windows 95 compatible design.
Nvidia pioneered the specialized Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). CPUs execute tasks sequentially but GPUs execute tasks all at once. A CPU functions like a delivery truck, dropping off one package at a time; a GPU is more like a fleet of motorcycles spreading across a city.
Nvidia invested billions in developing a new language “CUDA” for its GPU-enabling use cases outside of the narrow gaming industry. However, Wall Street did not approve and the share price declined by 70%.
Nvidia spent little time thinking about AI. AI had a lot of starts and stops in the past 40 years. The machines were far behind human intelligence. They could not even identify a dog or cat.
It all changed when a professor at the University of Toronto encouraged his students to use Nvidia’s CUDA and GPU to compete in the annual image net visual recognition contest in 2012. The result was outstanding – the machines could identify images of cats and dogs with nearly 100% accuracy.
That was the light bulb moment for AI.
Open AI used the Google transformer framework on Nvidia chips to digest the internet to make human-like connections and released ChatGPT in 2022. The rest is history.
What are the lessons?
1. Put it out to the universe and let the universe respond. It is better to take a chance and fail than to live a life with regret.
2. You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. – Steve Jobs
Some economists have observed that the Industrial Revolution led to a relative decline in the global population of horses, and have wondered if AI might do the same to humans. “Horses have limited career options,” Jensen Huang said. “For example, horses can’t type.”
4. Don't be a horse, learn to type AI prompts.
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