Book review: The Thinking Machine

I listened to this book as an audiobook through the Libby app, which basically brings your public library to your phone.

The Thinking Machine is about Jensen Huang and the rise of Nvidia from graphics chips to AI dominance.  The author, Stephen Witt, is a long-form tech journalist. His writing is nice and clear. But it does not have a distinctive voice. I kept thinking of Michael Lewis, whose books have more narrative personality and rhythm.

The book is written for a lay audience. Technical ideas are explained in simplified terms. Much of these were already familiar to me, and I had also lived through Nvidia going from graphics cards to AI chips. (I wish I had bought more stock.)

I was hoping to learn more about Jensen, his philosophy, habits, inner life, management style. There is not much of that in the book. I think that absence is telling. Jensen comes across as a very private person, and almost monastic about work. There does not seem to be a boundary there: he has become one with the work and the company.

The early years were the most interesting to me: young Jensen, finishing college, excelling at AMD, getting married, and the fragile early days of Nvidia. Nvidia was founded at a Denny's in San Jose when Jensen was 30 years old. By 1996 the company was a month from bankruptcy. The first chip had been an architectural dead end, the Sega contract had collapsed, and half the staff was gone. They were betting everything on a single new chip  designed in nine months and verified almost entirely through emulation since there was no time for the usual hardware prototype cycle. No spoilers: it worked, they survived. I think Jensen's resilience, obsession, and inability to let anything go must have been forged in those years. I suspect Jensen's resilience, obsession, and inability to let anything go were forged in those years. And it is hard to ignore that the company that nearly died for lack of simulation went on to make simulation (CUDA, PhysX, Isaac, DRIVE, Omniverse) one of its defining strategic bets.

One recurring theme in the book is what it calls "strategic rage". Jensen publicly criticizes (no berates and yells at) people during meetings. The idea here is that the correction becomes educational for everyone in the room. So Jensen is characterized as giving a harsh lesson and making this a teaching point for others. (Then again, the book also says he shouted at his top-price culinary oven after messing up a recipe. What was strategic about that one?)

So is he an asshole?

I gotta admit, I would feel that way if I were on the receiving end of the yelling (or even in the same room during the yelling). But the picture in the book is more complicated. Jensen does not seem to be driven by cruelty or ego. He doesn't fire people, and tries to educate/elevate them after hiring.

To psychoanalyze the guy from a far, I think he has become one with the work and the mission. He is obsessive, controlling, and emotionally fused with the mission. When the work fails, he reacts viscerally. Apparently even kitchen appliances are not spared.

I found myself oddly sympathetic with Jensen. Maybe because competence is increasingly rare these days. After dealing with enough half-hearted work, incompetent contractors, and people who do not care, I began to deeply value competence. 

Here is a strange example: someone pickpocketed my wallet near the Trevi Fountain in Rome. After the initial shock and the credit-card cancellations, I found myself thinking: this person was unbelievably good at their job. I felt nothing, no bump, no distraction, nothing... The wallet disappeared from the deep front pocket of my jeans like a magic trick. Respect! I remember thinking: if only I were that good/competent at my own work.

That is the feeling Jensen inspires for me. Competence at terrifying scale. Yes, he gets angry and yells in the face of incompetence. But he cares deeply, and he is the hardest worker in the company. I would still work for him. I would want him leading my army.

That temper made the rounds online recently. Jensen went on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast in April, and the middle section turned into a long argument about exporting GPUs to China. Dwarkesh played devil's advocate, channeling Dario Amodei's earlier framing: more compute to China means more risk, especially if a model like Anthropic's Mythos lands there first.

Jensen answered the question. Then he answered it again. Then he answered it a third time from yet another angle. China already has the compute. The 7nm gap is offset by energy abundance and parallelism. Restricting exports just builds Huawei's ecosystem faster (this is exactly what happened when the U.S. ceded telecoms). He made the marginal-sales argument, the CUDA stickiness argument. He laid out a structured case. Eventually, after the same question came back yet again in the same wording, he pushed back hard: "you're not talking to somebody who woke up a loser". The news and people on Reddit seized on this as Jensen losing his composure.

But Dwarkesh dropped the ball there, not Jensen! There might be real holes to pick at in Jensen's case and maybe a case for a competent pushback to move the conversation forward. Instead Dwarkesh kept re-asking the same question in the same wording, leaning on Dario's framing like a script. That was a total failure. A competent interviewer does the homework, identifies the load-bearing claim, and presses on the one place it cracks. Be hard on Jensen, by all means, but bring something. Do not just run the same query against the same response expecting different output. Jensen showed competence in that interview, and he couldn't forgive the total incompetence on Dwarskesh's side. By the way, I was also shouting at Dwarkesh when he kept repeating the same question without listening to Jensen's answers.

Ok, enough said, let's move on...

The most important thing the book communicates is that Nvidia's success was not luck. Jensen saw the importance of parallel computation early and he bet on it more than a decade before the bet paid off. CUDA launched in 2006 as a way to make the GPU programmable for general work, not just graphics. The thesis was that someday someone would need massive parallelism for something other than rendering polygons. Until then Nvidia kept building the toolchain, the libraries, the developer ecosystem, and quietly absorbed the cost. Scientific computing and data analytics were the early adopters, but the market was small and the R&D was very expensive. Wall Street hated CUDA. Activist investors pushed Jensen to kill it. The stock went down. By the late 2000s, the thesis looked like a lost bet.

Then AlexNet happened in 2012, and every machine learning researcher in the world became customers. AI walked into the building Jensen had been constructing for a decade. By the time competitors understood the opportunity, Nvidia had a software moat that hardware alone could not catch.

This part impressed me most: Jensen's conviction on the thesis sustained over decades. He was willing to be misunderstood for more than a decade, because he believed in that thesis. Dwarkesh... bruh, please... fight in your own weight class.