Pro Perspectives 6/5/23

June 05, 2023

Over the past two weeks, we've focused on the game-changing earnings call from Nvidia, where the Founder/CEO of the world's leading player in AI compared the significance of the ChatGPT launch (in November of last year) to that of the iPhone, where all of the advancements in technology came together.
 
Jensen Huang founded Nvidia over thirty years ago.  Not only is he rare, in that he is a founding partner, and remains CEO, but he is the longest tenured CEO in the technology industry.
 
He calls Nvidia's technology, the world's engine for generative AI. This is the type of artificial intelligence that can create new content by learning from existing data.  And Nvidia has dominant market share in producing the discrete GPU technology that powers it.
 
So, with the "ChatGPT moment," there is a strong case to be made that Nvidia has become the most important company in the world.
 
Now, Huang has done a lot of media in recent months, along with a recent commencement speech at National Taiwan University. 
 
If we want to know what this AI revolution means and what the future looks like, there is no one better to tell us.  
 
Here are some things he's said that stand out to me…  
 
First, he compares generative AI to the advent of the PC, the internet, the cloud, and the mobile cloud (a computer in your pocket).  But he says "AI is far more fundamental … it's a rebirth of the computer industry and a golden opportunity."
 
He says it will democratize computing.  By that he means that AI will be everyone's "co-pilot," enabling everyone to build powerful computer applications using simple human language (not complicated computer programming language). 
 
As for corporate winners and losers:  When looking back on these previous tech revolutions, he says "it's very unlikely that the companies that were great before it (the revolution), are still great after it." 
 
Translation:  It will transform industries, and create new industries.  As with the iphone (mobile cloud), there will new and reinvented infrastructure players, new platforms and new ecosystems.
 
And it's all cost reducing (deflationary).  It's energy reducing ("green").  And it's productivity enhancing.  Huang highlights all of these benefits. 
 
For all of this to take place, Huang says over a trillion-dollars of the world's traditional computers will be replaced with new "accelerated AI computers" (moving from CPU to GPU).  This is the digital transformation.  It's underway, and it's early.    
 
Beyond that, he says the "next big reinvention" will be "when AI meets $100 trillion dollars of the world's industries."  When "AI meets the physical world." 
 
Nvidia's Omniverse software is built to power this.  Omniverse is to industry, what Facebook's Metaverse is to consumer. 
 
He ended a long interview a few months ago by saying he thought he would continue running Nvidia for three of four more decades, and that he would be a robot.  I'm not sure that he was joking.