Lost 3 trillion in 3 days, Huang's magical life

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2024-07-02 14:09Creators in the entertainment field

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01 NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang plays a pivotal role in the AI revolution, and the company's market value once surpassed Microsoft and Apple, becoming the world's largest listed company in terms of market capitalization.

02 Huang Jenxun became the richest man in China with a net worth of $77 billion, and is expected to surpass Musk in the future and become the richest man in the world.

03In addition to his success in the field of graphics processing technology, Huang also led LinkedIn Weida to successfully transform artificial intelligence, becoming the hard currency in the new wave of artificial intelligence.

04However, NVIDIA's stock price has also risen and fallen with the rise and fall of popular concepts such as cryptocurrencies and the metaverse, and Huang has led the company to turn the corner again and again and find the next growth point.

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In the past, if you weren't a veteran gamer, you probably didn't know about Huang and his Nvidia.

In the current era of AI, all roads lead to NVIDIA, and it's hard to ignore him and its existence.

On June 18, Nvidia's total market capitalization reached $3.34 trillion, surpassing Microsoft and Apple to become the world's largest listed company by market capitalization. Huang himself is worth more than $100 billion.

Although Nvidia's "number one in the world" was only briefly in office for a day. On June 24, Nvidia's stock price plummeted, evaporating 3.1 trillion yuan in 3 days, creating history.

In April this year, according to the National Business Daily, Huang became the richest man in China with a net worth of $77 billion. Some media even said that he will surpass Musk in the future and become the richest man in the world.

Regardless of their value, it is undeniable that Huang and his NVIDIA are playing a pivotal role in the current AI revolution.

During the gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century, the people who made the most money were not those who looked for gold mines, but those who provided shovels.

Today, Huang Jensen and his Nvidia are the shovel sellers who made a fortune in this AI craze.

On June 15, 2024, Huang was invited to attend the California Institute of Technology's commencement ceremony and deliver a speech.

"As the physicist Feynman put it: 'The world is full of uncertainty,' and it can be unfair to us and difficult for us. You need to get rid of it quickly (Swiftly Shake It Off) ......"

Huang played Taylor's homophonic meme at Caltech's commencement speech

Before he could finish his sentence, Huang couldn't wait to stop and look up at the graduates in the audience with expectant eyes.

Seeing the blank expression in the audience, he shook his head helplessly and said, "Obviously, you are busy reading books every day", and then added unwillingly excitedly: "Please, this homophonic stalk is very funny, okay, I'm happy myself", which made the field warm up again.

The CEO of Nvidia, who played Taylor's homophonic stalk and was miserably cold, was called "the Taylor Swift of the tech world" by Zuckerberg. Both have brought huge economic effects, are also highly sought after, and have unprecedented influence on a global scale.

In March 2024, NVIDIA's annual GTC conference returned to offline for the first time, and 30,000 tickets for the event, known as the "AI Spring Festival Gala", were sold out.

In his opening remarks, Huang said, "I want you to know that this is not a concert, it's a developer tech conference. And laughed at himself for not pre-rehearsing his speech on the treadmill like Taylor.

From graduation speeches at major schools to talk shows in major media outlets, Huang talked about entrepreneurial stories, the future of technology, and golden sentences that went viral on the Internet, becoming inspirational and English learning materials for the new generation.

The Xiaomi Mi 3 flagship released in 2013 was equipped with Nvidia's chips, and when the new product was released, Huang and Lei Jun shared the stage

In early June, Huang attended the Taipei Computer Show in China, and as soon as he landed at the airport, people raised their mobile phones and shouted, "The Godfather of AI is here."

The booths that Huang visited at the computer show have become photo spots for fans. Whether attending exhibitions or visiting night markets after work, Huang was surrounded by fans asking for autographs and group photos everywhere he went, including one enthusiastic female fan who asked him to sign directly to his chest.

Those present looked embarrassed, but Huang was unhurried and carefully left his signature on the fan's chest after smiling and asking, "Is this a good idea?"

Huang signed on the chest of fans

At the beginning of this year, he attended the annual meeting of Nvidia in China, wearing a large Northeast flower jacket, holding a flower handkerchief, and a video of performing with employees went viral. When the lottery was drawn, the lucky employee HuaWei was accidentally drawn, and after Huang saw it, he called "why is your name Huawei" in broken Chinese.

Huang twisted Yangge at Nvidia's annual meeting in China

In the industry, Huang is also in the spotlight, a beacon that influences the direction of technology practitioners and investors.

At GTC, he was the one who "answered everything". Journalists from all sides kept throwing out a series of questions such as technology trends and supply chain conditions, waiting for him to give his opinion. Technology practitioners and investors hope to smell new trends from technology conferences and keep up with the pace of the big guys.

Before becoming the godfather of technology, Huang's upbringing was the quintessential inspirational narrative.

At the beginning of an inspirational story, the protagonist often suffers.

Huang was born in Taiwan Province in 1963 to a chemical engineer father and an elementary school teacher. In the '60s, Huang's father first set foot on American soil because of the company's employee training. When he was 5 years old, his family moved to Thailand due to his father's job transfer.

During his years in Thailand, even though Huang's mother didn't know English, she picked 10 random words from an English dictionary every day for the brothers to learn.

In Thailand in the early '70s, when the situation was volatile, 9-year-old Huang and his brother were sent to the United States to join their uncle in the United States, while his parents remained in Thailand.

However, his uncle, who had just immigrated to Washington State, had little money and could barely speak English, so by accident sent the Huang brothers to a boarding school in Kentucky.

The O'Neida boarding school they attended, which was actually a reformatory school, was home to many troubled teenagers who had been expelled for not following the school's rules and regulations.

In 2019, Huang and his wife donated $2 million to Oneida Baptist College to build new dormitories and academic buildings

Huang, 10, was the youngest student there. On the first night of his 17-year-old roommate, Huang saw seven scars from the fight while changing clothes.

Every student at Oneida has to work, and as the youngest boy, Huang is tasked with cleaning the toilets throughout the school.

Mr. Wong, who is short in stature, has a strong English accent and an Asian face, is seen by some students as the perfect target for teasing.

On the way to school every day, there is a suspension bridge that is rickety to walk, and most of the old wooden planks paved on the bridge are damaged and lost. When Huang crossed the bridge, local boys would grab a rope and try to pull him down.

"For some reason, it never seemed to affect him, and he just got rid of the past," Huang's classmate recalled.

In 2023, speaking to The New Yorker, Huang bluntly said that it was his time at Oneida that he developed a resilient character, "and he spoke fondly about the [now-defunct] pedestrian bridge, but not the bullies who tried to push him down."

Parents and children on opposite sides of the world exchange information about each other by sending tapes to each other. Every month, their parents in Thailand would send four tapes of recordings, and the brothers would record what they had done today, what they had for dinner, and how big the burgers were on the table.

Two years later, Huang's parents came to the United States, and the family moved to Oregon. Since then, Huang, like other talented Asian-American kids, has been admitted to Oregon State University's electrical engineering program with honors along the way.

Jensen Huang in college

After college, he and Lori Mills, his now wife, were assigned as lab partners.

In his pursuit of Mills, Huang was unconfident about his many conditions. He was the youngest student in his class due to skipping a grade, two years younger than 19-year-old Mills, and with the appearance of a teddy bear, he "looked like he was only 12 years old."

After thinking about it, the only place where I can show my charm is to do my homework. Every weekend, Huang calls Mills and pesters her to do her homework with him: "Do you want to do your homework?" or "We've got to do our homework" and "It's time to do homework."

After six months of doing homework together, Huang successfully invited Mills to go on a date.

Huang with his wife, Mills

When Mills once asked Huang what he wanted to do in college, the 17-year-old said, "I'm going to be the CEO of the company when I'm 30." ”

Whether Huang's career statement is a face-saving gesture in front of his girlfriend or a deliberate dream expression, 13 years later, he has indeed achieved his ambition without fail.

February 17, 1993, his 30th birthday, was his first day as CEO of Nvidia.

In 1993, ten years after graduating from college and working in an executive position at a technology company, Huang and two friends who were unhappy with their jobs discussed the idea of creating Nvidia at a chain restaurant chain next to the highway in San Jose, California.

The discussion was chosen at the restaurant because it was quieter than at home, coffee was cheaper, and Huang had previously worked as a waiter at an Oregon chain.

The three of them discussed their grand ideas for a long time, and were even driven to the back of the restaurant by the boss. In the end, they moved to co-founder Prim's air-conditioned room and discussed the name of Nvidia - Nvidia.

When they came up with names, they couldn't think of names, so they named all the files NV (Next Version).

In the end, the three of them simply looked up all the words with the letters NV, and finally found a Latin word - invidia, which means "jealousy". After the rewriting, the name Nvidia was born.

When they founded NVIDIA, the trio foresaw a future where the market needed more powerful hardware to render computer graphics and solve problems that general-purpose computers couldn't.

At the time, however, the computer revolution had just begun, and such specialized and high-performance tools were non-existent, and Huang's mother, after hearing about her son's grand business plan, asked rhetorically, "Can't you just get a job?" ”

Huang's mother's reaction when she learned of her son's idea to start a business

In addition to having a prophetic foresight of future technology trends, the three of them are young in everything about entrepreneurship.

Not knowing how to write a business plan, Huang chose to go to a bookstore to find out.

In the business book section, he saw a book with a simple and straightforward name, called "How to Write a Business Plan", which was thick and had more than 450 pages.

After buying it home, he casually flipped a few pages and regretted it, thinking: Forget it, by the time I read it, the company would probably have gone bankrupt and the money had been spent. At that time, he and his wife already had two children, and they only had about six months of living expenses in the bank.

When he ran for investment, he often felt terrified in the face of successful people in suits and leather shoes in Silicon Valley, feeling that he was "surrounded by a group of adults".

Eventually, the trio started with $40,000 in capital and received an initial investment of $20 million from a venture capital firm. With this support, Nvidia has been able to get through the difficult first few years and gradually gain a solid position in the market.

In the early days, Nvidia's office was located off the Lawrence Highway in Sunnyvale, Calif., where employees had lunch around a ping-pong table and shared a bathroom with another company.

Nvidia now has its headquarters building in California

"It was a tough few years," said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Nvidia's gaming division. "The world at that time was not fully aware of what we were doing, what we were doing was the foundation of humanity."

What Lebaredian calls the "foundation of humanity" is GPU graphics processing technology.

To put it simply, a GPU, like a CPU, is a computer processing unit.

CPUs can perform complex calculations like university professors, but the computing power is limited, with only 4 computing units; GPUs do simple school-like calculations, but they have 1,000 compute units.

For video rendering, big data computing, and deep learning that involve a large number of pixels and data points, GPUs are even more proficient.

In 2009, Nvidia showed the difference between the CPU (top) and the GPU (bottom).

Lebaredian attributes Nvidia's ability to withstand years of market skepticism due to Huang's belief in the potential of graphics technology and his visionary thinking.

Initially, NVIDIA focused on applying GPU technology to the gaming field, constantly improving the realism of video game graphics. As with the same emphasis on visual effects as games, NVIDIA's GPU technology can also be seen everywhere in the film special effects industry. From "Avatar" to "Dune", the special effects of Hollywood blockbusters are realized by using graphics cards equipped with NVIDIA.

At Nvidia's April 2020 event, Jensen Huang used 3D simulation technology to simulate 15 seconds

At the time of the Bitcoin boom, Nvidia's graphics cards were used for mining.

In the era of big data and artificial intelligence, Nvidia has become famous, and it makes money while lying down.

In 2020, 80% of the world's cloud computing and data centers were powered by NVIDIA's GPUs; New energy vehicle companies exploring autonomous driving technology need to use NVIDIA's chips; ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence, was trained with 10,000 Nvidia GPUs.

Huang said he didn't anticipate the development of self-driving cars or when the era of artificial intelligence would come, but he was a firm believer in the benefits of graphics technology.

"I've been talking about the same thing all the time, and I hardly have to change my PPT."

Founded more than 30 years ago, from video games to artificial intelligence, Nvidia seems to have stepped on every outlet, but in fact, the company was once "only 30 days away from bankruptcy".

Huang once summed up his past failures, the first of which occurred in the early days of the company's business.

At that time, Nvidia won a large order from Sega, a Japanese game manufacturer. During the development process, Nvidia chose to use non-traditional quad rendering technology, but before the chip was developed, Microsoft announced that it would release Windows 95 Direct3D, and only support triangle rendering technology.

Not being compatible with Microsoft means losing gamers from all over the world.

Nvidia is in a dilemma: continue in the current direction, the product launched is doomed to failure; But by this time, the development had already cost the company a lot of money, and if the contract with Sega was not completed, the company would face bankruptcy.

Huang decided to stop his current R&D and move to mainstream technology in the market.

He contacted Sega's CEO, Shoichiro Irami, and confessed to him that Nvidia was currently in the wrong technical direction and could not complete the contract, asked Sega to find another partner, and embarrassedly asked Sega to still pay the full amount so that Nvidia could continue to operate.

Unexpectedly, Shoichiro Iriko agreed. Relying on the $5 million that Sega sent carbon in the snow, Nvidia escaped death and survived.

"It was his understanding and generosity that extended our lives by six months," Huang recalled. In 1997, Nvidia launched the Riva 128 chip, which was not only compatible with Microsoft, but also four times faster than competing products, and sold 1 million chips in four months after it was launched.

During that time, Huang often said in the company, "Our company will go out of business in 30 days," which was also retained and became Nvidia's unofficial motto to warn everyone to be prepared for danger in times of peace.

In 1999, Nvidia went public. The following year, Sega sold Nvidia's stock for about $15 million, allowing it to stay in business even when it exited the gaming hardware industry in 2001.

In 1999, Sega CEO Shoichiro Iriko introduced the new video game console Dreamcast, which was developed by NVIDIA in the early days of GPUs, and later Sega looked for another partner

第二次失败，关于现在成为英伟达“护城河”的CUDA（Compute Unified Device Architecture，统一计算架构）。

In 2007, Huang decided to build CUDA into all of the company's GPUs in order to extend GPU technology beyond graphics experts to all programmers, allowing them to process data in addition to graphics.

This expensive, long-term investment is highly skeptical by shareholders. With years of weak performance and the financial crisis, shareholders are looking to Nvidia to improve profitability.

The host of a well-known American podcast commented: "They were not aiming at a big market, but an obscure corner of academic and scientific computing, but they spent billions of dollars on it."

In order to demonstrate the market potential of CUDA, NVIDIA has vigorously promoted it in universities and research institutes.

In 2012, at the ImageNet Visual Recognition Challenge, three scholars trained the convolutional neural network AlexNet through two NVIDIA GPU graphics cards with built-in CUDA ecology, and finally won the championship with the accuracy of crushing the second place.

Because of the excellent grades, the organizers even suspected that they were cheating. In the same year, Google researchers trained a neural network to recognize cat videos, using about 16,000 CPUs.

The three scholars who won the championship: Jeffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, and his students Alex Krizewski and Ilya Sutskevi

It was only then that the world realized the enormous potential of deep learning.

NVIDIA GPUs, which have powerful computing power and are capable of data training due to built-in CUDA, have become hard currency in the new wave of artificial intelligence.

In 2015, after discovering that GPUs could power the AI revolution, Huang made the decision to transform.

According to Greg Estes, vice president at Nvidia, "He sent an email on Friday night saying that everything was going to go to deep learning and that we were no longer a graphics company. By Monday morning, we had set up an AI company. Really, it's that fast. ”

In 2016, Huang handed over the world's first AI system, DGX-1, to OpenAI. Six years later, OpenAI shocked the world with ChatGPT, which was trained using 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

After that, major domestic Internet manufacturers have stepped up the layout of large models, and the "100 model war" has begun.

Huang's gamble of a decade ago is paying off.

In the wave of AI, Microsoft, Google, Meta and other major manufacturers all need NVIDIA's GPUs as a shovel for nuggets

Today, almost all new creations in the field of artificial intelligence are inseparable from NVIDIA's GPU graphics cards.

Although various major manufacturers have also begun to develop chips, with the accumulation of ten years ahead and the running speed of one major update a year, NVIDIA's GPU graphics cards are still invincible in the market.

Nvidia's GPU graphics card was robbed by tech bigwigs, and even Musk sighed: "It's much harder to get a GPU than to get drugs."

In September 2023, Musk and another billionaire, Oracle Chairman Ellison, dined with Huang at a luxury Japanese restaurant in Silicon Valley.

Ellison, who is in his eighties, said: "Elon [Musk] and I were begging during the dinner, and I think that is the right word to describe us." ”

Under the wave of AI, NVIDIA's stock price has also risen.

In a recent interview, he said that robotics will make major breakthroughs in the next 2-3 years, and that in the future robots will be ubiquitous and "robots will become as ubiquitous as today's cars".

That's a huge market, and Huang apparently got a ticket to a new world with his super-powerful products.

In 2008, when Nvidia's stock price reached $100 a share, Huang made good on a bet with a colleague and tattooed the Nvidia logo on his biceps

In 2015, Nvidia's market capitalization was only $10 billion, and nearly a decade later, it is in the $3 trillion club.

On February 23 this year, Nvidia's stock price rose 16% in a single day, and its market value increased by more than $270 billion overnight, which is equivalent to "rising" out of Kweichow Moutai overnight.

The exaggerated increase of 300 times in 10 years has made many people bluntly say that if they go back in time, the first thing they must do is to buy Nvidia stock.

Surrounded by everyone, Huang was promoted to the new icon of Silicon Valley.

Silicon Valley's celebrity CEOs have their own style of dressing. Mr. Jobs wore a black turtleneck, blue jeans and New Balance sneakers, while Mr. Zuckerberg usually wore a plain-colored sweater and T-shirt.

Unlike the first two slightly low-key polytechnic men, the 61-year-old new godfather of tech has a black leather coat.

Huang and Zuckerberg swapped coats

As his clothes are, Huang's style is also very bold and tough. Although he said in an interview that he hardly shopped, his wife bought all the clothes because he didn't like clothes that made him feel itchy, and his wife knew which fabrics didn't make him itch.

Now, around Nvidia and Huang, in addition to fanatical sentiment, there is also bubble questioning.

After all, Nvidia's stock price has also risen and fallen with the rise and fall of popular concepts such as cryptocurrencies and the metaverse.

Nvidia was affected by the collapse of the currency circle in 2018, and its market value fell sharply

But in the same way, Huang Jenxun also took Nvidia to turn the corner again and again and found the next growth point.

"You're either running for food, or you're running to avoid being food. Often you can't tell which one is the case, but no matter what, run. Last year, Huang encouraged students.

At the age of 61, he is also encouraging himself.

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