Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang 60 Minutes Interview

Only four companies in the world are worth more than $2 trillion: Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, parent company of Google, and computer chip maker Nvidia. The California-based company saw its stock market value soar from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in just eight months this past year, fueled by the insatiable demand for its cutting-edge technology, the hardware and software that make today’s artificial intelligence possible.

(00:31)
We wondered how a company founded in 1993 to improve video game graphics turned into a titan of 21st-century AI. So, we went to Silicon Valley to meet Nvidia’s 61-year-old co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang, who has no doubt AI is about to change everything.

The story will continue in a moment.

At Nvidia’s annual developers conference this past March, the mood wasn’t just upbeat. It was downright giddy. More than 11,000 enthusiasts, software developers, tech moguls, and happy shareholders, filed into San Jose’s pro hockey arena to kick off a four-day AI extravaganza. They came to see this man: Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia.

Welcome to GTC!

What was that like for you to walk out on that stage and see that?

You know, Bill, I’m an engineer. I’m not a performer. When I walked out there, and all of the people going crazy, it took the breath out of me. And so I was the scariest I’ve ever been. I’m still scared.

You’d never know it. Clad in his signature cool, black outfit, Jensen shared the stage with Nvidia-powered robots.

Let me finish up real quick.

And shared his vision of an AI future.

A new Industrial Revolution.

It reminded us of the transformational moment when Apple’s Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Jensen Huang unveiled Nvidia’s latest graphics processing unit, or GPU.

This is Blackwell.

Designed in America, but made in Taiwan like most advanced semiconductors, Blackwell, he says, is the fastest chip ever.

Google is gearing up for Blackwell. The whole industry is gearing up for Blackwell.

Nvidia ushered in the AI revolution with its game-changing GPU, a single chip able to process a myriad of calculations all at once, not sequentially like more standard chips. The GPU is the engine of Nvidia’s AI computer, enabling it to rapidly absorb a fire hose of information.

It does quadrillions of calculations a second, it’s just insane numbers.

Is it doing things now that surprise you?

We’re hoping that it does things that surprise us. That’s the whole point. In some areas like drug discovery designing better materials that are lighter, stronger. We need artificial intelligence to help us explore the universe in places that we could’ve never done ourselves.

(03:26)
Let me show you. Here, Bill, look at this.

Jensen took us around the GTC Convention Hall to show us what AI has made possible in just the past few years.

I’m making your drink, now.

Some creations were dazzling.

This is a digital twin of the earth. Once it learns how to calculate weather, it can calculate and predict weather 3,000 times faster than a supercomputer, and 1,000 times less energy.

But Nvidia’s AI revolution extends far beyond this hall.

Blue metallic spaceship, and let’s generate something.

Pinar Seyhan Demirdag is originally from Istanbul, but co-founded Cuebric near Boston. Her AI application uses Nvidia’s GPUs to instantly turn a simple text prompt into a virtual movie set for a fraction of the cost of today’s backdrops.

(04:23)
This isn’t something that’s already planned and in there?

No, we’re doing it in real time. It’s live.

Is Hollywood knocking at your door?

We’re getting a lot of love.

Nearby at Generate:Biomedicines, Dr. Alex Snyder, head of research and development, is using Nvidia’s technology to create protein-based drugs. She was surprised at first to see they showed promise in the lab.

Initially when I was told about the application of AI to drug development, I sort of rolled my eyes and said, “Yeah, show me the data.” And then I looked at the data, and it was very compelling.

Dr. Snyder’s team asks its AI models to create new proteins to fight specific diseases like cancer and asthma. A new way to defeat the coronavirus is now in clinical trials.

(05:14)
You’re now working with proteins that do not exist in nature? That you’re coming up with by way of AI?

Yes. We are actually generating what we call de novo, completely new structures that have not existed before.

Do you trust it?

As scientists we can’t trust. We have to test. We’re not putting Frankensteins into people. We’re taking what’s known and we’re really pushing the field, we’re pushing the biology to make drugs that look like regular drugs, but function even better.

This is a technology that will only get better from here.

Brett Adcock is CEO of Figure, a Silicon Valley startup with funding from Nvidia. Look at his answer to labor shortages: an Nvidia GPU-driven prototype called Figure 01.

I think what’s been really extraordinary is the pace of progress we’ve made in 21 months.

From zero to this in 21 months.

Zero to this, yeah. We are walking this robot in under a year since I incorporated the company.

Could you do this without Nvidia’s technology?

We think they’re arguably the best in the world at this. I don’t know if this would be possible without them.

I’m here to assist with tasks as requested.

We were amazed that Figure 01 is not just walking, but seemed to reason.

(06:32)
Hand me something healthy.

On it.

Figure 01 was able to understand I wanted the orange, not the packaged snack.

(06:42)
Thank you.

(06:43)
It’s not yet perfected.

(06:45)
You’re going to get it.

(06:46)
But the early results are so promising, German automaker BMW plans to start testing the robot in its South Carolina factory this year.

I think there’s an opportunity to ship billions of robots in the coming decades onto the planet.

Billions? I would think that a lot of workers would look at that as, “This robot is taking my job.”

I think over time, AI and robotics will start doing more and more of what humans can and better.

But what about the worker?

The workers work for companies. And so companies, when they become more productive, earnings increase. I’ve never seen one company that had earnings increase and not hire more people.

There are some jobs that are going to become obsolete.

Well, let me offer it this way. I believe that you still want human in the loop, because we have good judgment, because there are circumstances that the machines are just not going to understand.

The futuristic Nvidia campus sits just down the road from its modest birthplace, this Denny’s in San Jose.

(07:57)
Good morning.

(07:57)
Where 31 years ago, Nvidia was just an idea.

My goodness.

When he was 15, Jensen Huang worked as a dishwasher at Denny’s. As a 30-year-old electrical engineer, married with two children, he and two friends, Nvidia co-founders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, envisioned a whole new way of processing video game graphics.

And so we came here, right here to this Denny’s, sat right back there, and the three of us decided to start the company. Frankly I had no idea how to do it. And nor did they. None of us knew how to do anything.

Their big idea: accelerate the processing power of computers with a new graphics chip. Their initial attempt flopped and nearly bankrupted the company in 1996.

And the genius of the engineers, and Chris, and Curtis, we pivoted to the right way of doing things.

And created their groundbreaking GPU. The chip took video games from this, to this today.

Completely changed computer graphics, saved the company, launched us into the stratosphere.

Just eight years after Denny’s, Nvidia earned a spot in the S&P 500. Jensen then set his sights on developing the software and hardware for a revolutionary GPU-driven supercomputer, which would take the company far beyond video games. To Wall Street it was a risky bet. To early developers of AI, it was a revelation.

(09:37)
Was that luck or was that vision?

That was luck founded by vision. We invented this capability and then, one day, the researchers that were creating deep learning, discovered this architecture, because this architecture turns out to have been perfect for them.

Perfect for AI?

Perfect for AI.

(09:58)
This is the first one we’ve ever shipped.

In 2016, Jensen delivered Nvidia’s AI supercomputer, the first of its kind, to Elon Musk, then a board member of OpenAI, which used it to create the building blocks of ChatGPT.

How are you?

When AI took off …

Hey guys.

So did Jensen Huang’s reputation.

Can we get a picture?

Yeah, yeah.

He’s now a Silicon Valley celebrity. He told us the boy who immigrated from Taiwan at age nine could never have conceived of this.

It is the most extraordinary thing, Bill, that a normal dishwasher-busboy could grow up to be this. There’s no magic. It’s just 61 years of hard work every single day. I don’t think there’s anything more than that.

We met a humble Jensen at Denny’s. Back at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Slara, we saw he can be intense.

(10:59)
Let me tell you what some of the people who you work with said about you: Demanding. Perfectionist. Not easy to work for. All that sound right?

Perfectly, yeah. It should be like that. If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy.

(11:17)
All right, guys. Keep up the good work.

Nvidia has never done better. Investors are bullish. But last year more than 600 top AI scientists, ethicists, and others signed this statement urging caution, warning of AI’s risk to humanity.

(11:34)
When I talk to you and I hear you speak, part of me goes, “Gee whiz.” And the other part of me goes, “Oh my God. What are we in for?”

Yeah, yeah.

Which one is it?

It’s both. It’s both. Yeah. You’re feeling all the right feelings. I feel both.

You feel both?

Sure. Sure.

Humanity will have the choice to see themselves inferior to machines or superior to machines.

Pinar Seyhan Demirdag is an AI optimist, though she named her company Cuebric, an homage to Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Hello Hal, do you read me?

In that film, Hal, the AI computer goes rogue.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

(12:22)
I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.

I think that’s what worries people about AI, that we will lose control of it.

Just because a machine can do faster calculations, comparisons, and analytical solution creation, that doesn’t make it smarter than you. It simply computates faster. In my world, in my belief, smarts have to do with your capacity to love, create, expand, transcend. These are qualities that no machine can ever bear, that are reserved to only humans.

There is something going on.

Jensen Huang sees an AI future of progress and prosperity, not one with machines as our masters. We can only hope he’s right.

Thank you all for coming! Thank you.